YES WE CAN
We note the open letter written a few days ago by Snowden family attorney Bruce Fein to a lamentably unscrupulous Hollow Man:
The entire letter is worth a careful reading, yet the reference to Civil Disobedience prompts us to digress elsewhere within Thoreau’s essay, based in his own experience of refusing to pay a poll tax.
Counter friction represents the energy of the autonomous conscience set against unjust laws:
We further note that there has not been a single attempt by anyone representing the Obama administration to engage either Mr. Snowden or his attorney in dialogue regarding the counter-frictive substance of their moral and philosophical claims; rather, all public pronouncements are framed by the eristic drive to restrain, silence, imprison and punish.
Yet Mr. Snowden continues to breathe after his own fashion, while the scarecrows twist and wriggle.
Thoreau takes pity on his jailers, who had no idea who he was, or why he was there, anticipating the depraved indifference exhibited towards Pfc. Bradley Manning:
Anticipating the general public’s apathetic trance, as our formerly proud constitutional republic mutates into a feckless oligarchy, Thoreau writes:
SUMMER WEATHER FRIENDS
In the end, Thoreau finds solace among the children of his beloved Concord, hunting for huckleberries; nowadays, his every picked berry would no doubt be recorded as metadata.
A few months after his death in 1862, Emerson published a eulogy that we hope need never be applied to Edward Snowden, nor to any of the other prisoners of conscience unjustly incarcerated by the hollow men, the stuffed men; agents of metadata, agents of the machine.
As for those straw folk and their senseless antics, well you know how it goes:
Desperado Philosophy 