There's an old story about frogs based on what snopes (www.snopes.com), at least, declares to be an urban legend.
According to the story, if you put a frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out immediately. If, however, you put it in water of a comfortable temperature and gradually increase it, the frog will boil to death with no attempt to escape.
Though the story itself may be apocryphal, the moral is apt. We as individuals tend to be complacent when rights are removed one by one, under the idea that they don't affect us, so why should we bother.
The Reverend Martin Neimoeller was confronted with the harsh consequences of complacency in Nazi Germany. As he chronicled, he didn't speak out when they came for the "others", because he wasn't one of them. But when they came for him, there was noone left to speak.
In America, we are fast slipping from the Republic the founding fathers envisioned. It didn't start with George Bush, heck, it didn't even start with Abraham Lincoln, one of the worst dictators this country ever encountered as a leader. It began, in fact, when the ink on the Constitution was barely dry. But it began through a series of gradual compromises, all of them accepted in the name of "security", "the common good", and any number of pat excuses that simply were euphemisms for crippling the rights and freedoms of the individual.
I am by no means an advocate for complete anarchy. But I firmly believe, as did Thomas Jefferson, that "the government which governs best is that which governs least". Laws should be meant to protect order in society, not to hinder freedom. Laws, then, such as murder, assault, rape, and property crime laws, truly exist for the common good. But many other laws, such as those against drugs, prostitution, zoning laws, and others, do not work for the common good but work to suppress the rights of the individual.
How far have we gone down the slippery slope? Far enough that we don't object to random stops and searches (a comment from a random search on the Las Vegas strip was a cheery "well, it's for my own good").
Freedom loving citizens cannot and MUST not allow these continual violations to occur. We must speak out, and we must work towards a government that recognizes and restores the rights of the individual. Or we will ALL suffer the consequences.