To the editor:

America spies on its own citizens? You don’t say. What a surprise!

I mean in such a pure and ethical government such as this current one, who’d have guessed that the NSA was listening in on your calls to foreign sex hot lines?

Oh wait, you know who could have guessed that the U.S. spies on its own citizens? Anyone with half an IQ point and any knowledge of history. It’s been going on for years. It is documented repeatedly in the ’60s when the FBI demanded that the NSA “keep an eye” on civil-rights groups and anti-war groups.

Even last year the Journal-World reported that the FBI had been investigating members of Solidarity, the anarchist library on Massachusetts Street. But who cares that the FBI was in town sending informants to peace meetings? Or that FBI agents visited the parents of several local anarchists?

What difference does it make if the government spies on us? We’ll be safer, right? Go ahead and keep thinking that. When you’re not allowed to listen to your favorite band, or your favorite author is jailed for un-American thought, you just keep thinking that. When art, philosophy, religion, music and love become a matter of the state in order to prevent not only terrorism but all crime, you just have fun living in your little dictatorship.

Until then, just keep ignoring the descent into extremism.

Matt Stambaugh,

Lawrence