If there is anything that the last 8 years of the Bush administration might have taught us, it is that in order for our society to function as the healthy democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers, we need more people to question authority and fewer people blindly to obey authority.
Let me say, first and foremost, that in no way is this an advocacy for any form of violent or illegal activity that might cause harm to innocent lives or the destruction of public or private property.
What I am suggesting is that conscientious members of society need to be driven by their conscience and good sense into questioning the actions and motivations of public officials and holding them publicly accountable. That is the basis and crux of any functioning democracy and is necessary for our society to remain free and equal, as opposed to allowing our civil liberties to be compromised or unscrupulous opportunists to amass wealth and power at the expense of the naïve public who fail to call their actions and agendas into question.
Public officials are not kings or dictators or gods. They are politicians elected to office by the will of the electorate. As such, they are obligated and accountable to the public. Which means that they must never be blindly obeyed, as they would be in some authoritarian regime under martial law, as, for example, in the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran or the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il. Rather, they must be questioned and held accountable, especially when they appeal to public paranoia or mass hysteria or xenophobia to further their political agendas, as we have seen during the Bush administration.
Following the 9/11 attacks, it is a matter of historical record and indisputable fact that the Bush administration pretty blatantly exploited public paranoia and mass hysteria associated with the potential for future terrorist attacks to further a political agenda that has since been exposed as shockingly immoral and depraved—an agenda that included such policies as preemptive military invasion, detention and incarceration of terrorist suspects without charges or a trial, torture and warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—the quintessence of what might well be described as a reign of terror of Orwellian dimensions.
However, the simple fact remains that the only reason that the Bush administration was able to get away with what they did so blatantly, leaving the rest of us, retrospectively, to gnash our teeth in futility, was that no one in the opposition had the guts or spine to question the authority of the Bush White House. Everyone was scared into submission. In spite of street protests against the Iraq War, which appear to have had limited impact on the Bush administration's policy-making other than to justify their authoritarian stance even further, no one in the corridors of power or the press or media had the guts to question authority at the appropriate time.
Of course, now the press and media are full of scandalous exposés concerning the corruption of the Bush administration, but what good is that, after the damage has already been done and countless lives have been destroyed? It's too late and is of little consequence in retrospect. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it appears that foresight is completely lacking. All that we have is the delayed response of a gutless oppostion.
And what is the solution that the electorate apparently prescribes to the errors and excesses of the near-totalitarian Bush administration? To bestow totalitarian-like powers of unquestioned power and authority to future administrations, thereby repeating the cycle of unquestioned authoritarianism resulting from unchecked political power, followed by the teeth-gnashing and recriminations that are invariably too late.
What is required, rather, is for tough, conscientious individuals to question authority at the right time and not to wait until after the deed has been done. Public officials should be held accountable for their policies as an ongoing part of the democratic process rather than after they have abused their unchecked, unquestioned powers to such a degree that the only option appears to be popular revolt or widespread insurrection, as in Iran recently. Rather, when conscientious individuals question authority as a part of the democratic process, that precludes the possibility of mass insurrection, because authority is always kept in check and held accountable.
Let's keep in mind that the number one excuse cited by Nazi war criminals indicted during the Nuremberg trials was that they were blindly following orders—obeying the authorities without question. One wonders, if enough members of Hitler's National Socialist Party had the cojones to question authority by following their conscience, whether Nazism might have been as successful as it was in its path to conquest and genocide.
The bottom line is that questioning authority is not only a good thing for the body politic and for the health of the democracy, it is good for the mind and soul of those who regularly question authority—because it means both following the promptings of one's conscience as well as actively thinking creatively and out-of-the-box. The other option, essentially, is to succumb to the brain-dead, vegetative state of blind obedience to authority—to turn into a soulless, brainless permanent fixture of the establishment like so many of the gutless, soulless, spineless elected officials who fail to act when action is called for and whom the rest of us—the average citizenry—can thank for such recent catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of Wall Street and the economy and the scandals of the Bush White House.
Horizon Cybermedia is about encouraging one to think creatively and out-of-the-box through the medium of art and cinema. While in no way do we seek to promote or encourage any sort of violent or illegal activity, we do believe that questioning authority is both healthy and necessary for a functioning democratic society to flourish and grow, as opposed to stagnate and die through blind submission to the often-erroneous decrees of elected public officials. We believe that it is important to penetrate the Orwellian rhetoric of political opportunists and to question the agendas of politicians in order to keep society free and alive and to enable the individual to stay quick-witted and sharp-minded.
Do check out our ongoing film series, Exploration with Uday Gunjikar, at our website, http://www.explorationtheseries.com, which is continually updated with exciting, fresh media content. Currently showing is a film on my recent excursion to the Wine Country—Sonoma County, CA—and coming soon is a film about the intriguing city of Calcutta, India.
Wishing you the very best,
Uday Gunjikar,
Founder and CEO,
Horizon Cybermedia, Inc.
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