A Little Bit Worried About America
by Lance Brown
It's now been over a week since the "911 Attacks,"
and I have to say, I'm a little bit worried about our country. 70+ percent
think it would be o.k. if we caused civilian casualties in our hunt for
the perpetrators—somehow ignoring the fact that causing civilian
casualties is what we are hunting down the perpetrators for in the first
place. 70+ percent
think it would be o.k. if we had to forego some of our freedoms in
response to the terrorism— somehow ignoring the fact that our freedoms
are what make this a country worth defending from terrorists.
At my StopCarnivore.org
website, there has been a sudden shift in e-mailed opinions—the majority
of those e-mailing me think that use of Carnivore and increased
surveillance are a fair price to pay in light of the "new"
dangers we are now facing. One woman (a Eugenia
Provence) went so far as to hope that my website suffers an attack of
its own—hoping that StopCarnivore.org
gets "hacked, junked, and thrown out the window." Apparently
terrorism is o.k. as long as it is against perceived "enemies"
of the United States. Eugenia
seems to think that because I still believe that we should follow the
Constitution, I am one of those enemies, and thus it is o.k. to wish harm
upon me and my endeavors.
"Now is not the appropriate time to be criticizing
our Government," is a popular thing to say this week. "We must
do whatever we need to in order to rid our country of the menace of
terrorism," is another. "We may need to temporarily suspend some
of our liberties in order to preserve freedom," is how another one
goes. And of course there is, "When the Constitution was written/
when our Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights, they couldn't have
imagined the world as it is today."
Let's take a look at each of those ideas, and see how
much merit they have:
"Now is not the appropriate time to be
criticizing our Government"
Right now, the stakes involved in any action our
Government takes are higher than at most times in our nation's
history. We are deep in the midst of defining what America and the World
will be like in the 21st Century and beyond.
The actions that world leaders take now could result in
restoring freedom on earth for all, or they could result in the world
being annihilated by nuclear weapons. It's possible that the freedoms
which make America so great will be preserved indefinitely, and it is also
possible that those freedoms will be eliminated forever in a short period
of time.
Now is the time when careful critique and analysis of
what our Government does is more important than ever before in our lives.
It doesn't do us much good to keep the country alive if we allow the
principles which make the country worth saving to be eroded for the sake
of "national unity." I support my country in its efforts to
rebuild; I support my government in its efforts to fight terrorism; but I
cannot sit idly by while opportunistic politicians use this crisis as
cover for their less-than-noble pursuits. Now more than ever we must watch
what our leaders are doing on "our behalf" like a hawk. It won't
do us any good to defeat terrorism, only to look around us and find that
the America we loved is a thing of the past.
Perhaps if the voices decrying the Vietnam War as an immoral
waste of time had been louder, a few thousand American men would still be
alive. Perhaps if those who said the military shouldn't be deployed at
campus protests had been louder, there wouldn't have been any Kent State
Massacre.
"We must do whatever we need to in order to rid
our country of the menace of terrorism"
This is one of the more disturbing mantras floating
around in the past week. Many Americans seem willing to go to any extreme,
in hopes of eliminating terrorism. Perhaps the most frightening of those
extremes is the fact that most Americans think it's permissible for the
U.S. to kill innocent civilians in pursuit of our new faceless enemy.
Let's review that once, really slowly. What are we so
upset about? The fact that innocent civilians were killed in an attack.
And we should be upset— the murder of innocent civilians is a hateful,
abhorrent act. And yet somehow (I honestly can't understand how) people
seem to be finding a way to rationalize the creating of more innocent
casualties in this war between us and the terrorists. Somehow it is
escaping those folks that as soon as we kill innocent people, we become
terrorists ourselves. It escapes them that our killing of innocent people
in the past 60 years is one of the things that has made us a terrorist
target in the first place. It somehow escapes them that for each innocent
mother we kill, we may be creating an orphan who will someday be another
terrorist, looking to avenge the death of his innocent, dead mother.
"We may need to temporarily suspend some of our
liberties in order to preserve freedom"
Killing innocent people isn't the only extreme Americans
seem willing to go to. If you believe the polls, most Americans are also
willing to give up some of our remaining civil liberties in order to fight
this war. Perhaps this is because most Americans are under the impression
that we will only have to give up these liberties for a limited amount of
time. If only it were so.
During World War II, a law was introduced to force the
withholding of income tax from people's paychecks— producing an
important revenue boost during the war. And though it has been almost 60
years since we have been in a war of that magnitude, income tax
withholding is still with us—an apparently permanent leftover from WWII. During the Civil War, states' rights were
largely suspended in order to "preserve the union."
Unfortunately, states never got back most of those rights, and in many
ways America's major wars have resulted the humongous Federal Government that we
have today.
Whatever we give up to fight this war against terrorism
we may never get back. If you are ready to give up your right to privacy,
your freedom of movement; if you are ready to have roadblocks at all of
our borders; if you are ready to have national fingerprinting and I.D.
cards—you had better be ready to live with those things (or without
those freedoms) for the rest of your life. And you should be aware that you are
sticking future generations with these "temporary measures" as
well. We are not talking about temporary war measures to help fight
terrorism—we are talking about permanent changes to the way America
works. If, someday in the future, you are sitting in jail because you
forgot to bring your national I.D. card with you while walking your dog,
you can look back to these weeks as the time when you sent yourself to
jail.
"Nothing is so permanent as
a temporary government program," said Milton Friedman. He's a
smart guy. Probably smarter than you and I. Don't form your opinions
around the idea that the changes being proposed for America will be
temporary. Odds are, even if it says "temporary" right in
the legislation, it's a change we'll be stuck with for a generation
or two, at minimum.
"When the Constitution was written/ when our
Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights, they couldn't have imagined the
world as it is today."
There isn't much that irks me more than when the
"average Joe" second-guesses the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.
For that matter, I don't like it much when even exceptional Joes
second-guess them. These men thought long and hard while designing our
government, and they weren't trying to design something that would work
only in their time. They aimed to design a government which could change
and grow with the times, while always preserving what they had determined
to be essential liberties.
The invention of airplanes and computers does not change
what our Founding Fathers concluded was good government, after considering
all the governments that had come and gone before them. The fact that the
majority of communication takes place via telephones and e-mail instead of
in person and via letters does not change a person's right to be secure in
their "papers and effects."
And as for the idea that our Founding Fathers could not
anticipate what the future would hold—keep in mind that these are the
men who managed to break away from one of the greatest empires on earth, and
create a nation so impressive and prosperous that it became the greatest
empire itself, faster than any nation in the history of the world. These
men had foresight to spare, and they set up our government to last
forever— and to preserve our rights forever.
The Bill of Rights was intended to list the essential
rights that all people should have...it wasn't a temporary measure—it
was a list of liberties which should never be infringed upon. The idea
that the existence of the Internet, or fiber optics, or automobiles, or
whatever else somehow makes the Bill of Rights obsolete is short-sighted
almost to the point of being painful.
"They that can give up
essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety," said Benjamin Franklin. What did Ben Franklin know? Enough to discover that
lightning was made of electricity; enough to invent the battery,
and bifocal lenses, and a new type of stove, and the odometer, among other
things. And he knew a lot more about running a free country than you or I do.
Do you think you know enough to second-guess the wisdom
of one of our country's wisest men? Do so at your own peril. Personally,
I'll take Ben's word for it. I'm much more inclined to trust the judgment
of him and his colleagues than I am to trust the fools and thieves in
Congress today, or the opinions of a random sample of 1000 people called
up by MSNBC.
I'm worried for our country. I worry for poor Eugenia
Provence, who wishes harm upon me; I worry for the war hawks who are
wishing a burning Hell upon Afghanistan; I worry for the Muslim-Americans
who will find life more difficult for a long time to come; mostly, I worry
for the future generations who will be forced to live under the laws that
may get pushed through in the coming weeks.
Be smart, America. Calm and smart. Our country is fine
(for the most part)—please don't screw it up. We have to live here, you
know?
Read more of Lance Brown's views here or
View Lance's campaign weblog here
