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the working-class, including the members of the military who are surviving on food stamps because even combat pay doesn't make up for the loss of income from the reservists' jobs, could depose George Bush once and for all. They live in our America, not Bush's. The real mystery is why 51% of Americans still approve of his performance in office. Can the panic generated by 9-11, by the ever-increasing security measures such as the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security administration with its multicolored warnings, conspire to make us so fearful of outside attack that we fail to tend to the decay of our society?
Perhaps if Bush had been more attentive to the lessons of history than to the statistics of baseball, he would have learned that the founders of our republic believed in a strict separation between church and state. Bush's public piety and pronouncements about sin would have appalled George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. While the Presidential Prayer Team is not a governmental agency, and it does not violate the separation of church and state, it seems determined to bridge that gap.
I say we should pray to protect the separation of church and state as well as all of our precious civil liberties, and pray for a new administration in November. It can't hurt.
Rosa Maria Pegueros is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island
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