As a senior American who cherishes our traditional "innocent until proven guilty" legal premise, I loathe the Bush administration's insistence upon paranoia as the basis for new, unreasonably restrictive public procedures here at home as well as for their offensive foreign policies.

I long to reclaim the country we had before the current regime took control.   All of us were freer, more hopeful, more genuinely secure, and -most important- more honorable.  

As I understood it, and as we were taught in our public schools, we "Americans" were a people who took pride in striving not for world domination, but for governance by respectable, enforceable laws, dedicated to just and compassionate ethics.  But now, every morning, I wake up and wonder: How much longer will we be forced to endure the arrogance and disgrace of these terror-mongers' trampling on that true American dream?

--Carole A. Kronberg
  Detroit