Home » Archives » September 2007 » Liberty Versus Security - The Challenge Of Our Generation
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09/11/2007: "Liberty Versus Security - The Challenge Of Our Generation"
You probably remember where you were on 9-11-01 – we all do. But do you remember 9-10-01? Do you remember how your life was on that day? In many ways, that life ended 24 hours later.
In the wake of disasters like 9-11 or Katrina, the government feels obligated to respond. They know that they must react – the people demand that they take some kind of action. But what kind of action should the politicians take – short term responses that placate the masses, or long term plans to prevent future occurrences. Too often, neither answer represents a true solution, and the results are unsatisfactory to all.
After 9-11, the Bush Administration took steps it felt would help make the people safer. The most visible of those was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Safety Agency, resulting in tens of thousands of people working to prevent future terror attacks – but do they really help?
When I fly, I have to make sure I’m wearing clean socks, because I’m going to have to take off my shoes. I have to limit what I pack in my carry-on bag, because there’s a list of things I can’t take with me. The burden - and the inconvenience – is placed on the average flyer. When I fish, I see gunboats patrolling the harbor. If I’m unlucky, I’m chosen for a random inspection – at gunpoint – to insure I don’t have a dirty bomb in the bait tank. The burden – and the inconvenience – is placed on the average fisherman. These steps and so many more like them are seen as “making us safer”, but are they really? Or are they just giving politicians something to point to as action during their next re-election campaign. If a politican proposed steps that might actually make our lives safer, would we even accept the restrictions those steps might require?
The challenge is how to protect the people without unduly impacting their lives. If you live in England or Israel, countries that have felt the sting of homeland violence for decades, the idea of governmental intrusion into lives is second nature. But it’s not so easy here. A friend reminded me last night of the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY.
We are not a people who take kindly to having our government tell us how to run our lives, even if the government believes they are taking actions for our own good. But at the same time, somewhere along the line we forgot that sometimes, bad things happen. That’s the conundrum – we won’t let our government take actions to protect us that interfere with our lives, but if something bad happens we blame our government for having not taken previous actions to prevent the bad thing from happening in the first place.
It’s easy to say that instead of being reactive, the government should be proactive - hire some bright folks to analyze data and try and figure out where and how the next attack will occur, and develop the correct steps to prevent it. But that presents a problem, too, because we are historically distrustful of our government when it comes to data analysis and investigation. We’re terrified that if they get too much data together, and too much power over that data, we’ll be that much closer to Orwell’s Big Brother scenario.
For a lot of different reasons, I don’t believe we are any safer today than we were on 9-11-01. Our foreign policy choices have isolated us from much of the world, and created a great deal of animosity in the Middle East. Our post 9-11 homeland security activities focus too much on what happened last time, and not enough on what will happen next time. The mistrust of our government bred through decades of disappointment prevents many of the actions that might actually make us safer.
The fact of the matter is that any steps we take now expecting immediate results are exactly the kind of temporary safety Franklin warned of. The only real solutions to our problems will require long term commitment by both the government and the people. We need to re-evaluate our position in the world, and our decisions with regard to other countries. We need to take steps to be better neighbors, and recognize that it will take many, many years to build and repair the relationships that we need to have with other countries. We need to ask ourselves what restrictions - if any - to our lives we are willing to accept in the name of security. Finally, we need to accept that part of the price for liberty is that sometimes, bad things will happen to good people – even someone peacefully strapped into their airline seat.
