Better Safe than Sorry?
Whenever a new terror plot is uncovered, and especially when one is acted out, it seems that we all go running to the government with our rights, freedoms, and liberty in our hands and say, "Here, take as much as you need to keep us safe."
Suddenly we are all in favor of selectively violating someone's right of habeus corpus (preventing one from being held indefinitely in custody without a trial), are more than happy to give up our rights to privacy, free speech, free travel. Let the government spy on us. We aren't doing anyting wrong. Why should we care if we have nothing to hide?
Well, quite a lot actually.
First of all, the government doesn't have a great track record when it comes to protecting our rights under normal circumstances. Evidence is routinely thrown out of court and convinctions are routinely overturned because police and/or prosecutors failed to do due diligence in their investigation of a crime. They took shortcuts, violated the Constiution, framed a suspect, etc.
Fortunately our system has enough checks and balances that at least some of the time, when innocent people are falsely accused, or when guilty people are convicted as a resut of illegal police and prosecution techniques, the courts make things right.
But now that September 11 has scared us to death, we seem more than willing to let those very protections slide, at least where terrorism is concerned, and in the name of safety and security, we are willing to give up our freedom.
Perhaps we should take a moment to consider which countries are the safest (if you define safety being a very low likelihood of being accosted by a mugger or blown up by a terrorist). At the top of the list would be North Korea, China, Cuba, Iran. In other words, places where people have the least freedom to express themselves, to live their lives as they choose, to speak out against government abuses and injustice.
Those pepole are extremely "safe" as long as they don't fight city hall. As long as they look the other way, keep their mouths shut, rat out their neighbors for dissenting-- they are as safe as a bear cub in a bear cave. But at what price?
What we don't realize is that whenever one is willing to give up a certain degree of freedom, one has opened the door to giving it all up. One has stepped on the proverbial slippery slope on which things can only go downhill.
But our government is not like the government in North Korea or China or Cuba or Iran! Not now, but only because our Constitution has kept it in check. If we give away suspected terrorists rights in the interest of safety, we give up our own rights as well, when the day comes that we say or do something the people in power don't like.
You may have heard the expression, "No justice, no peace." Now here's another saying that is equally true, "No freedom, no safety. No liberty, no security." Because soon enough, those we empower to protect us, will use that power against us.
If it means getting used to more threats to our security, and more creative ways of staying safe, so be it, but it shouldn't mean dialing back the Constitution. The expression "better safe than sorry," is only true until being safe and being sorry are no mutually exclusive. When one is both safe and sorry, one is no longer safe, only sorry.
The beauty and power of the American story has been its placement of liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness at the top of the hierarchy. Our justice system is rigged to prevent an innocent person's conviction at the potential cost of letting a guilty person go free (the presumption of innocence until proven guilty).
The day we are ready to put safety ahead of freedom is the day we have lost our freedom and we have lost our country. There is nothing left to protect or defend or die for. On the other hand, Patrick Henry's words, "Give me liberty or give me death," remind us that if it is a choice between safety and freedom, freedom is still worth it.
Certainly there are many ways to reduce the risks of terrorism without compromising our American values, without the Catch 22 of safety versus freedom. We can be strong, creative, and determined to protect our rights from the outside as well as from within. And doing so, within our existing rule of law, maintaning our existing rights, our Constitution, and our values, is the only way we can win in the end.
If we are willing to send our sons and daughters to die overseas to protect our liberty, why not also be willing to concede occasional deaths due to terrorism at home, as part of the price we gladyly pay to remain free. Not that we are going to lie down and let the terrorists run rampant, but we are going to draw the line at the Constitution in the ways we combat it, and if that means we are slightly more vulnerable to an occasional attack, that's a lesser of evils. That's the price for liberty, that heoric Americans have paid throughout our history and will continue to pay as long as we have a history.