Fear, necessity, freedom, despair, and hope

NOTE: Co-blogger Jack Grant posted this highly original and thoughtful piece on this site yesterday. We are running it again, high up in today’s postings, to ensure it gets maximum readership. Please keep scrolling since newer posts are below this one. This post is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to ALL (those who might agree or disagree with Jack).

Cross-posted to Random Fate.

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A preface is needed:

One month ago I was in France, sleeping in a hotel room after my possessions had been moved from my apartment in downtown Grenoble had been packed and loaded for shipping to the US.

Two weeks and one day ago I arrived in Memphis to visit my parents for Christmas, with the hope of helping my father regain enough strength for a new round of chemotherapy to combat his recurrent cancer.

One week and three days ago I was in an overnight vigil in a hospital room with my brother watching and acting according to what we thought were my father’s wishes as his body slowly failed.

Five days ago I walked away alone from the gathering that was preparing to depart after the graveside ceremony of the funeral, to place the flower that had been on my lapel, signifying that I was a pallbearer, on the head of my father’s coffin, the sole flower at that end for the other pallbearers’ flowers were at the foot.

In the days since I have been sitting at my father’s desk, going through his financial papers and occasionally encountering a printout of an email from me or a transcript of an instant message conversation we had, and at one point a post I had written that I told him in an email described how much I respected him. Even at the last he said, “Thank you,” when I said, “I love you.” These printouts are the visible proof of the feelings he couldn’t speak about.

To say that I have had some other priorities than blogworld in the past weeks would be putting it mildly.

With that explanation regarding the basis of my thoughts, here are those thoughts:

I have been told by many people, both those who know me in person and those who only know what I write, that I do not suffer fools gladly. After taking a short break today to read the various blogs on my list I find little other than breathtaking inanity. I do not know if it is a manifestation of my grief or a stirring of the rage that created so much of my personality, an anger at the idiocy I saw in the world that I thought I had long ago resolved, but I now refuse to suffer fools at all.

Unfortunately, the fools far outnumber those who are willing to put in the hard work needed to think.

The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.
   -Thomas Jefferson

September 11, 2001 did not change the world, it merely changed our view of the world.

Some reacted with fear that was far out of proportion to the event.

Unfortunately, they continue to overreact.

Far too many are saying, “I have nothing to fear from government intrusion in my life if I am doing nothing wrong.”

Far too many have no conception of the foundations of our Constitution, of the very reasons for the rebellion against the legitimate government that Great Britain held over the American Colonies in the 18th Century.

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.
   -Earl Warren

The Cold War ended over a decade ago, but it is less than two decades past, have we so soon forgotten the existential threat we faced then?

Compared to the nuclear annihilation that was the underpinning of the aptly acronymed Mutual Assured Destruction how can any terrorist attack cause the overweening fear that prompts agreement to measures that were unthinkable when we lived in the shadow of the balance of terror of complete ruin?

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
   -Edmund Burke

The atmosphere surrounding the events of September 11, 2001 was further obscured with a veil of fear because of the anthrax mailings, a crime of terror that is still unsolved.

Yet, in total, how many people were affected? Less than 3,500 for all the events in the last months of 2001.

Going by simple odds, you have a larger chance of being directly affected by slipping on the soap in your shower than being in a terrorist attack, even before the United States was on alert against Islamist-based groups using terrorism as a tactic.

For that is what terrorism is, a tactic, and every time we react with fear, every time we change a law to reduce a freedom because we fear another assault, every time we react instead of think, we hand a victory to those using that tactic of terror.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
   -H. L. Mencken

Each year approximately 40,000 people die in automobile accidents with over 2 million associated permanent injuries.

Need I point out this is more than 10 times the number who died in the terrorist attacks of 2001? Yet I see no “War on Bad Driving” to combat this parade of death.

Every year, more than 20,000 die from the flu or complications thereof, and more than 15,000 people are murdered.

Where are we spending our money, and where are we focusing our fears?

“But the terrorists are trying to get a nuclear weapon, and if they succeed they will kill millions!”

Back up a step, boys and girls, it took the infrastructure of entire nations to build enough nuclear weapons to kill millions at once. It is a valid point that terrorist organizations are trying to get nuclear weapons, and unfortunately our policies towards North Korea and Iran are making that possibility more of a probability, but it is an equally valid point to look at cost versus benefit.

Suppose that in 2011 terrorists get a nuclear weapon, and they get another in 2021, and each weapon kills approximately 100,000 (based upon the crude bombs used at the end of World War II), and suppose we spend the amount of money that we are spending (and wasting) on pointless anti-terrorism measures to reduce the automobile accident death rate by 50%. After 10 years, we would have saved 200,000 people from dying in auto accidents, versus 100,000 dying in a nuclear explosion that our current countermeasures are not addressing in the first place.

Do not confuse the appearance of increasing security with an actual increase in safety.

Do not confuse the infringement of freedoms with an actual increase in effectiveness of countermeasures against true enemies.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
   -William Pitt

There are those who claim we are in a “new kind of war” and need to change our very way of life to combat this new threat.

They do not recall their history, for terrorist tactics have long existed in the United States, sometimes practiced by corporations against strikers, sometimes practiced by unions against those not in the union, sometimes practiced by anarchists with no agenda but violence. President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, a follower of a belief that does not seem too far removed from the radical Islamist nihilists.

“Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty” used to mean we watched the government — not the other way around.
   -Bill Stewart

The attitude I see from many in their support, or at best lack of objection, to the attitudes of the current administration when it claims that a mere act of Congress authorizing the war in Afghanistan covers any and all warrantless wiretapping and other activities that are contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution would be heartbreaking if my heart were intact.

A useful illustration of what we are forgetting from the recent past, something we fought for half a century, but something that is now on the path of fear we now trod, from the movie The Hunt for Red October, which for those who are not familiar with it or the book is about a Soviet submarine commander who has set up a scheme to defect with several officers because the Soviet Union has created a ballistic missile submarine whose sole purpose is for a first-strike nuclear attack:

“You can travel all over the United States?” the First Officer asks.

“Yes.” Captain Ramius replies.

“No papers?”

“No papers…”

Was it so long ago that we recognized and treasured the freedoms we protected despite the terrors of the “fifth column” of Communism, freedoms that we pointed out were denied in the Soviet Union, so long ago that we have forgotten them?

Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
   -Benjamin Franklin

If it were warrantless wiretaps alone, that would be reason enough to be alarmed, but there are other assaults upon the way of life that our leaders claim they are defending, whether it is detention because “you ain’t from ’round here” to declarations that US citizens are enemy combatants with no appeal, and gaming the court system when those declarations are questioned in a venue not under control of the executive.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
   -Thomas Paine

Note, Thomas Paine said that we must guard even our enemies from oppression, otherwise we establish a precedent that will expand to reach to those of us who are not enemies of our traditions but perceived as enemies of those who are in power, for governments and power inevitably expand, corrupt, and in the end destroy freedoms unless the governed are continually on guard against that expansion, corruption, and destruction.

Our founders managed to leave us with a system of government that has swayed like a pendulum, too far to one side or the other between anarchic freedoms and overly-regulated lives, but self-correcting for over 200 years. We cannot be complacent about that self-correction, because despite the nomenclature, the “self” in the correction is our responsibility.

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
   -Sam Rayburn

Sadly, there are a lot of jackasses in the world with few carpenters, and that is painfully obvious when one takes a casual perusal of the politically oriented weblogs on both the right-wing and the left.

The first line in a recent post at Bloggledygook (the author of said blog is a carpenter, not a jackass) was, “What is one to do when one lives in a sewer of self-delusion and religious psychosis?” Often, although the author of that line was referring to a climate of radical, fundamentalist Islam, I feel that it applies equally well to certain groups in the United States (Pat Robertson or the Daily Kos, anyone?).

So, what is one to do?

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
   -Theodore Roosevelt

In the past weeks, with all the turmoil in my life, I have been tempted to say, “to Hell with it,” and give up this weblog. The new urgency of priorities always present but formerly held in abeyance because there was a perception of time available forces changes in perspective.

In the end, though, what are the priorities?

The most important lesson I received from my father is similar to that my brother spoke of at the funeral, leave the world a better place than you found it.

I am only one, but I am still one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
   -Edward Everett Hale

What is better than ensuring that the freedoms we inherited are preserved and passed on? A man who has become idolized to the point of becoming an icon to some had a few words on that question:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
   -Ronald Reagan

Yet the lesson of the goal alone is useless without some knowledge of the “how” to accomplish it. Fortunately for me, I was also taught the “how” by my father, a lesson that took, even if it makes for me being unpleasant company at times:

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.
   -Albert Einstein

I will not stop questioning.