Deadening oppression this time has many sources, rather than the monolithic face of a state run out of control.

Midnight by the ACLU clock would not be heralded by a gunfire-punctuated parade of those who love freedom to a bloodstained wall. It be almost genteel, attended by our quiet acceptance of endless high-tech watching, yoked to corporate/governmental nudges, made almost irresistible by our lassitude and loss of basic freedoms.

The presidential administration which misled us off to war in Iraq has proved itself the natural handmaiden of the process whereby we are giving up at home freedoms which were bought and are secured by the blood of patriots.

This is not a party-line fight, unless you're a fascist. It is as fundamental as the Federalist Papers and as down-home as a schoolyard playground.

If the administrations's massive digital surveillance borders on the incomprehensible, and the corporate involvement therein oddly undisturbing, the damage we have been done by the loss of Habeaus Corpus is easily seen.

Our Hallsboro Elementary School teachers made Habeaus Corpus and its importance clear to us decades ago in those unairconditioned classrooms on the margin of Bogue Swamp. It seemed to me that we were all able to feel, if not to really understand, how important it was to limit the goverment's ability to lock us up and throw away the key.

We learned that Americans can petition the court, and expect to receive a speedy hearing. Americans are therefore not required to languish without trial behind bars.

Well, we could in the decades before the Bush anti-revolution. The decades before Bush signed the Military Commissions act of 2006, and effectively did away with Habeaus Corpus.

None of my close friends lost their freedom or lives the day Habeaus Corpus died . Our era's civil amputations seem almost genteel and are largely nonphysical here in Raleigh.

Oh, I was physically searched and patted down the last time I traveled by air. Never mind that I was for most of my adult life cleared by the Secret Service for direct access to presidential candidates.

Really, it didn't hurt.

No one arbitrarily declared me a terrorist and locked me away for life. Although when Bush signed the Military Commissions act of 2006, he made that possibility a fact of American life.

Thus we are almost painlessly giving up what we once called "freedom," and can with sufficient spine and intelligence recover.

The process is not and will not be simple, but there is a straightforward guiding principle.

As three of my classmates and I agreed at Hallsoboro School some 50 years ago when struggling with a more personal form of oppression, we must always resist.

The fundamental answer to tyranny, regardless of how we choose to say the word, is "no."

No.

You may find a way to compel me for a time.

Yet I will always return to "no," until at last my freedom openly prevails.

Until then, freedom lives in me, and I vow to search and labor without ceasing to give it full expression.