Here’s the question everyone is asking:

“Is Edward Snowden a hero or a criminal, a whistleblower or a traitor?”

But here’s the question they really should be asking:

“Does America still have its original revolutionary backbone, or are we a nation of sheep?”

Conventional opinion says that the CIA will have Snowden extradited and then criminalized, put on trial like Bradley Manning, demonized like Daniel Ellsberg, or even murdered like Garry Webb – that he will spend at least ten years in prison, or life, or worse. This may well happen, but there is another, much more tantalizing possibility that Snowden’s courageous action has triggered, something much more momentous – a sudden unexpected shift in the American Psyche – a realization that since 9/11 something has gone terribly wrong in the land of the free and the home of the brave … that the NSA, CIA, FBI are starting to smell like the East German’s Stasi, The Russian KGB, The Fascist police states of the 1930’s and 1940’s – that Americans are spying on Americans … that we are being treated like a nation of petrified snitches cowering in the dark … and that the time has come to turn the light on in a darkened America.

Maybe this weekend someone working at NSA headquarters will get fed up, once and for all, with spying on his fellow citizens and turn another light on in that big, black box … telling us in detail how things really work in there.

And then, maybe the week after, a CIA operative at the Pentagon will suddenly decide to come clean and tell us how the Iraq war really started and provide us with one of those torture videos that were supposedly destroyed.

And then, maybe an army intelligence officer will fill us in on what really happened in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen – telling us who our allies really are and what regimes we really support in the deep global state behind the veneer of mainstream media. Then …

Maybe on July 4th someone at The Whitehouse will remember that this nation was built upon revolution … and that the nation’s integrity, democracy – hell, the nation’s entire future depends upon the existence of people like Snowden who dare to tell us what really goes on behind closed doors, that these otherwise ordinary people continue to summon the courage and humanity to come out of the shadows and take a stand against institutionalized criminality.

Maybe, like at the end of a movie, when the hero finally reveals his true identity and everyone rises to applause, an unstoppable wave of courageous souls will now stand up in solidarity and turn the lights on all over this darkened nation, kicking off a chain reaction of refusal against the military-surveillance complex that President Eisenhower tried to warn us against half a century ago.

So hey all you dreamers, schemers and expectant souls out there, are you ready to turn on the light?

#OCCUPYBLACKBOX