SpartanForever, how can you call America a democracy, or the first for that matter?
Democracy: laws are voted on directly by the people (ancient Athens is the first I believe)
Republic: people elect representatives who vote on laws (ancient Rome, after the fall of the Etruscan monarchy and before the rise of the empire)
The Founding Fathers hated the idea of a democracy (rule by the mob) and instead chose the stronger alternative, the republic (rule by the law).
Also there's all this debate about fighting terrorism in the Middle East. A few years ago everyone was screaming "Down with Saddam!" while they conveniently forget we're the ones that put him in power. And everyone's worried about new Iraq, the baby democracy (NOT, it's a republic too). The truth is that it won't work. It's not working now with our help. The reason is to have representative rule by the people, you first have to have a demographic to pull from. After the end of WWI, Britain carved up the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire, it did so without any regard to ethnicity, culture, or religion. The republican form of government doesn't work because there's no majority, no shared beliefs or problems, and sometimes no shared language. It's unnatural and therefore must be held together by force, by a strong-handed dictator. If we just let them alone, and let the current borders dissolve, then the Middle Eastern countries will reform into natural entities, based on some commonality (be it religion, ethnicity, language, culture, etc.). Why is everyone so against redrawing the lines on their maps? Yes, there might be a lot of bloodshed and upheaval as this happens, but in the long run it will stabilise and ultimately significantly decrease the current problems. It was foreign intervention into the region's affairs that caused the problem in the first place, and history has already shown that all of our attempts to fix it have led to even more problems. Let them fix it themselves.
And I don't understand how a free people could allow their government to spy on them. It's not about hiding anything, it's about privacy. And the feds talk about "Oh, the wiretapping has stopped a bunch of huge terrorist attacks" but they never have any proof to back it up. It's also small steps like these that transform a free country into a totalitarian police state. Remember what George Washington said: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." The government does not do things out of the goodness of its heart. It starts out with looking for terrorists, then it expands a little more to looking for serial killers and kidnappers, and it just snowballs, pushing for a little bit more every time until free speech is completely eradicated (for example, if you're talking to a friend and you criticise Bush for allowing torture, then you're siding with the terrorists and must therefore be sent Guantanamo before you decide to bomb Wal-Mart). The truth is that wiretapping puts us more at risk. If those monitoring stations were hacked or in any way compromised, our enemies would know everything, including what it is our government is looking for. In other words, we'd be telling the terrorist exactly what we look for, and they'd know exactly what to do to go undetected.
To quote Benjamin Franklin: "Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security."
Now who actually read that? Better yet, who understood it?
