A Little Security - The Debate Between Freedom vs Safety in the War on Terror

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

I hear time and again from harried travelers standing in massive security lines that all the dehumanizing security risks are worth it if it makes us safer. I hear the man on the street interviews proclaiming that if we have to give up a bit of the constitutional protections we enjoy to defeat the terrorists then so be it. Time and again you hear the pundits proclaim that the President needs extraordinary powers to protect us from the evildoers.

In response I refer you to the above quote, and in the hopes of updating Mr. Franklin's words for a younger generation, Nut up people! The only way the terrorists win is if they scare you into giving up the freedoms that make America great. If they hate us for our freedom, then we shouldn't have anything to worry about in another year or two, because we as a nation are peddling our freedom to the highest bidder in the vain hope that we alone can be perfectly safe in a dangerous world.

The problem with the idea that we can give up our rights in exchange for security is that first off it won't work. Terror and terrorists have always existed and will always exist. If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it's that when 19 guys with box cutters can take down two skyscrapers then we have to reevaluate our concept of safety. When that small a number of lunatics can do that much damage, then there is little we can do to protect ourselves from it. Sure we need to take reasonable steps to make it more difficult to hijack planes, we need to examine cargo containers coming into our ports, we need to make our borders more secure. But if I need to give up my rights as a citizen in order to prevent the off chance that I will be the victim of a terrorist bombing, then you can just blow me up right now.

The second problem is that even if it would work, what would be the cost? If we wind up living in a nation where the government can tap your phone, email, arrest and hold you without charge and torture a confession out of you, what have we won? We will have become yet another failed democratic experiment, just like so many in the past. Are we really to go the way of Rome? Rome was another republic that traded freedom for security and fell just the same.

I would much rather vanish in a flash of TNT than live a country so frightened of the world around it that it will give up anything, including what makes it great, in order to be able to sleep at night. The world has always been a nasty and brutish place, since our founding we have had to fight off the Brits, our own southern states, Nazis, Japanese imperialists and communists, all of whom really would have destroyed our way of life. We managed to do that without cowering behind a strong man who promised us safety in exchange for freedom. I find it hard to fathom that we aren't able to win this war on terror while maintaining the freedoms that have made us what we are today.