“I’m following rights journalist Glenn Greenwald’s coverage about Edward Snowden ~ his interviews of Snowden are well worth checking out online. Greenwald is getting at the important pieces and insights the leaks offer.
I wanted to offer a personal set of observations: Snowden in many ways embodies most of US Youth values ~ opportunistic, looking to make money, with access to subcultures, yet not aware of basic foreign policy. Somewhere along the lines, Snowden could not justify going along with what he was doing with his moral compass. Good for him. I wish all have that kind of integrity.
If one were to look at Snowden’s generic biography, it’s prototypical of America’s mediocre youth ~ he reveled in manga and anime; he listed Buddhism as his religion; after some college study, Snowden enlisted stating he ‘had had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression;’ later, he discovered his talent for coding and he could make serious money working in security. Clearly, his discovery of the extent of Surveillance was a moral shock and hence his felt imperative to leak. This also rings true.
The revelations ~ Snowden’s leaks ~ and the demonization that is now manifesting have a larger history and context, but, tragically, Americans tend not to know their own history ~ especially those parts that challenge a naïve nationalism. The current US public apathy to the abuse of drones and criminal remote control War summarily executed by Apache helicopters are conjoined precedence to the proverbial questions Americans asked right after 9/11 ~ ‘Why? Why? Why?’” ~ John Kuo Wei Tchen, Associate Professors of Social and Cultural Analysis
