Shut Up or Come Home, Eddie [View all]

[babylonsister]

http://www.politicalgarbagechute.com/shut-up-or-come-home-eddie/

Shut Up or Come Home, Eddie


Some days I wish that anyone but Edward Snowden had been the NSA Leak. I suppose in a world where we give the most disgusting and embarrassingly selfish among us reality TV shows in an effort to peek inside the lives of embarrassingly selfish and disgusting people that I shouldn’t be surprised at how turned off I’ve become to Snowden himself. Let me make something clear though — in no way do my personal feelings of “meh” for Snowden impact my feelings about the issue he laid bare for all of us to see. In no way do I think the preening smugness of Snowden that has turned me off to his personal cause should make anyone apathetic to whether or not our government is wantonly swallowing up terabytes of data on us for no good goddamned reason.

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The problem is that instead of taking the wool off our eyes and then remaining in the country to take interviews and explain himself, he bolted. He bolted to countries that have just as bad, if not terribly, terribly worse human rights violations on the books as we do. In point of fact, Snowden’s saga mostly points to the fact that the three big super powers, Russia, China and the United States are all engaged in various fucked-upedness and cherry-picking the egregious actions of one doesn’t excuse those of the other. He should have stayed home and faced the music but instead he took off and has ultimately just started to look like a politically-motivated libertarian with an ax to grind.

At this point I just want him to shut up so the business of fixing what’s broken can start. What Snowden seems to be ignoring is that part of the healing process is his trial. We need to let the laws work themselves out in order to identify where the most emergent of breaks lay and how to best go about fixing them. Until Snowden is tried and either acquitted or convicted our laws are meaningless. The very laws he proclaimed to be protecting, he’s flouting. The very same rule of law that he professed to love so much is being trampled on by his own feet.

It’s extremely frustrating to see an opportunity for real, honest dialog be hijacked by theatrics, and the thing is that it’s been Greenwald and Snowden who have been just as guilty of the hijacking as anyone else. I get it. Greenwald’s got to sell papers and Snowden is trying to keep himself visible so he doesn’t end up vanishing with no explanation. That said, we’ll never get around to actually getting people engaged on this subject until all the bullshit distractions go away.

Snowden himself is the biggest distraction. Where will he go? Where will he get asylum? All of these questions get asked and the much more important ones like “How are we going to tell our government to stop snooping into our shit?” get left unasked, let alone unanswered. It’s time for Snowden to be an adult and come home to face trial. I’m on his side. I’m pulling for an acquittal, but he has to stop taking the focus away from the very story he exposed and get out of the way.