Last weekend in St. Paul and Minneapolis, as the stage was being set for the Republican National Convention, police were executing heavily armed preemptive raids on several groups organizing nonviolent anti-war protests.

Acting on intelligence from the FBI, police entered several homes and buildings thought to contain protesters, breaking down doors, holding men, women and children at gunpoint, seizing political literature and arresting hundreds.

As horrifying as this is in a country once protected by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the real story lies in the fact that very few people seem to know or care about it.

Welcome to 1984.

With as many as 1.2 million dead in our latest illegal war (according to an ORB study), record-setting defense spending, record profits for government contractors, big oil and the corporations that have hijacked our nation, and a federal government that equally flaunts through policy and denies in the media its imperialist aspirations, there should be no shortage of outrage.

However, even in the face of these recent and blatant violations of civil rights, the streets of even the most liberal American cities remain silent. Even on a campus like the University of Colorado, where I am a student, once reputed for political activism amongst the student body, I hear nothing but crickets.

Where are the demonstrations?

Where are the petitions?

Where is the fire that used to drive us to fight for the freedom of speech afforded by our First Amendment?

Well, it's hard to protest what you simply don't know about, and, sadly, in regards to the incompetence of the popular media in this country, this seems to be business as usual.

Just last week I was astonished to find, after returning to Boulder after a week of protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, that nobody here in Boulder had really heard about it.

In fact, I had to dig around on the Internet to find any trace of news coverage, and the reports I was able to find were, with few exceptions, strikingly inaccurate, and went largely unnoticed.

Whether this is a conscious withholding of subversive information among popular media outlets, or a serious epidemic of head-up-your-ass syndrome among Americans, is unknown to me.

In either case, it's time to wake up, America (even you, liberal media).

We are rapidly approaching a period of silence and oppression, when you can say anything you want so long as it is not in regards to the injustice our federal government imposes upon people around the world with taxpayer dollars, and provided that nobody else is saying it with you.

Now more than ever it is our obligation to stand up and use it. Turn off your TV and educate yourselves as to what your higher-ups are up to; you'll be astonished to find that it's not about "freedom" or "justice" or "Jesus" as our president would have us believe.

It is time to find your voice and take back this runaway democracy. Strive for real change, not just a new face on the same war machine.

And if, by chance, in November that new face doesn't bring about the change you hoped for, don't be afraid to dust off that old First Amendment and exercise it.

You may experience some atrophy; this is normal.

Kevin Moran is a junior biology major at the University of Colorado.