David McElroy

To me, 50 years seems like a very long time. That’s more than half of the life of the average person. For us, a decade can seem forever. We’re so impatient that a year can seem like a long time to wait for a thing. But I sometimes forget that history is measured on a very different scale.

It was 50 years ago this week when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace made his theatrical stand against federal demands that the University of Alabama admit black students. It’s remembered as “the stand in the schoolhouse door,” but it was purely symbolic.

In his 1962 campaign, Wallace had promised to fight to prevent racial integration of any Alabama schools. His dramatic stand was a popular political position at the time, but he knew he couldn’t win the battle. It was merely important for his political future that he be seen as standing up to the Kennedy administration.

Hundreds of Alabama state troopers and Alabama National Guard troops were surrounding the building on the UA campus where registration took place at the time. After President John F. Kennedy federalized the National Guard troops, Brig. Gen. Henry Graham officially told Wallace that he was acting at the direction of the president — and he ordered Wallace to step aside.

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The NSA snooping mess isn’t enough to get Team Red and Team Blue to quit fighting each other. They remind me of rival gangs fighting for control of a sinking ship rather than working to keep the ship from sinking.

You might have thought this would be a non-partisan scandal. After all, the policy that the NSA is pursuing is clearly the same one that the government pursued under George W. Bush. Both administrations have pushed the boundaries of what it can do to snoop on people — in the name of security, of course.

But instead of acknowledging that we’re dealing with a crisis over a government that’s out of control in violating the rights of Americans, many politicians are more concerned with supporting their team than in dealing with the fundamental issues.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is a perfect example. McCaul is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and he doesn’t see a problem with the government collecting this information. He told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that he just doesn’t trust Team Blue with the information.

“The optics are terrible in this case when you consider the recent scandals,” McCaul said. “You have to ask yourself this question: Can you trust this administration with your phone records?”

That makes it clear what his issue with the snooping is — not whether government having your records is acceptable, but just whether the Obama administration can be trusted. He made that clear by saying the the newly revealed surveillance programs are “lawful” and helpful in fighting terrorists.

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What if you spent your whole life trying to alert people to something you knew would upset them, but when they finally did hear the message, they shrugged and said, “So what?”

Surely that’s the way some libertarians are going to start feeling as they realize that the NSA snooping scandal isn’t actually a scandal to most people. Many libertarians I know have spent years of their lives dedicated to spreading the word that the government is abusing the rights of the people.

“If people only understand what the government is doing to us, they’ll join us and vote the statists out of office,” many of them believed.

It turns out that the majority of Americans approve of the NSA snooping. That’s right. Not only aren’t they ready to rise up against oppressive Big Brother, they’re rather happy — because they think Big Brother is keeping them safe.

According to a new poll done last week by Pew Research — after the NSA online and phone spying stories came out — 56 percent of Americans think it’s just fine and dandy for the feds to monitor the phone calls of millions of Americans. Almost half of people of people said it’s OK for the federal government to review our emails, too. That’s been consistent over the past decade, because 45 percent approved of it in 2012 and 45 percent approved of it in last week’s poll.

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