SOJOURN Eureka Springs

marypat March 31st, 2007

We sat outside in the wind watching redbuds blend in with other spring growth – japonica, pear tree, dogwood, forsythia, even spearmint stretched calf high as we watched a season take over a yard in one afternoon. The wind thrust blossoms to the turf and lighters wouldn’t light, so tobacco went unfired. That made her edgy.
She, the master gardener, master cook and master of homestead chores, did not want to talk about how dry the earth is just an inch below our vision. She had stuck tomato plants in, knowing there could easily be a frost before May 10. No matter, she said, “I’ll just
plant more if it freezes. I watered them. Shouldn’t have to water in the spring.” She thumbed her Winston between her fingers like worry beads. She doesn’t live in Eureka Springs and neither do I. But it’s our hometown. “It’s flat out wrong that our city council refuses to defy Bush’s Patriot Act,” she said. She always protests when she can’t smoke.
“The Patriot Act specifically gives g-men the right to check out your library checkouts. It says they can enter your home with no invitation. Read your emails. It’s unthinkable. It’s a power the government simply snatched for itself, without input from us, insisting that unreasonable search and seizure is reasonable.”
She claimed that the dynamic of war has changed, then questioned whether it has, really. War has no rules, she remembered, just like love.

“Are we so terror-stricken that we allow our most temporary employee, the president, to continue bullying others? He’ll be out of here in two years, and we’ll be stuck with the consequences of his actions for the rest of our lives. You know and I know there are
fanatical scoundrels among us, just as there were in 1775.” She’d forgotten about smoking. “So the government invades citizens’ lives on a whim, trashes personal lives, makes sure we adhere to the rules of those who didn’t have enough sense to acknowledge intelligence from their own agencies before terrorists slammed our jets into our
buildings? It took the government 45 days to pass a law easing its ability to invade our heritage, wiping out 230 years of constitutional freedoms!”

We talked about city council members who resisted designating Eureka Springs a Patriot Act Free Community. One said she had heard our country would have a nuclear event at the hands of terrorists, and that if the government reading emails would prevent that, or at least catch the decoys, it would be okay to surrender privacy. Ludicrous. Everyone knows emails aren’t private. They told us in grade school to never write anything we didn’t want read in court.

Aldermen, a mayor, and an attorney speculated that the city could lose federal funds to run the trolleys, police and fire departments, and for heaven’s sakes, the Auditorium. Don’t you know the federal government wants that on its books?

“It’s not partisan,” she said. “It’s patriotism at its essence. It’s defending our land of the free. It’s making good on the promises colonists made when they told the British to keep their money, keep their navy, keep their attitude. We were a nation of 18th-century
hippies who insisted on freedom of speech, religion and private ownership, and were willing to fight a long, horrible, bloody war to ensure our children would not have to be unfairly taxed or invaded or spied on by a government that demanded unconditional obedience.

Highways. Trolleys. Insecurity. Profiling. Fear. We’ve been hoodwinked. “Becoming a Patriot Act Free Community is the only way to teach our young how vital it is for real freedom that Eureka Springs just say no,” she said. The wind stopped and she lit up. “The Patriot Act is alive and well in Eureka Springs.”

She exhaled much more than recycled smoke.

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