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The race is on.
Barely a week has passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. An estimated five to six thousand people died during those assaults. Already, draconian calls are rumbling from the halls of power to curtail our freedoms in a false tradeoff for "security" from terrorist incursions.
Simultaneously, we hear cries from commentators and others that we must not "let the terrorists" win by surrendering our liberty. Civil libertarians fear this tragedy will provide cover for the State to clamp down upon our rights. Their concerns are not mitigated any by officials, such as the Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, who state that our right to travel will not be curtailed...even while he implements policies that severely hobble that very right.
But then, hypocrisy and deceit do not suddenly vanish from the American political scene merely because a crisis looms to confront us.
None of the "fixes" saddled upon the American public to deal with the "perils" facing U.S. society after the Oklahoma City bombing and the downing of TWA Flight 800 did anything to forestall this terrorist action. If we are to judge a policy by its results, the restrictions already placed on American travelers can only be deemed abject failures.
It is a truism of the modern State, however, that -- unlike with private organizations and businesses that individuals can voluntarily support or leave -- whenever a program instituted by the State does not achieve its objectives, the bureaucrats and politicians redouble their efforts. More money, more restrictions, more control...
...less freedom.
The voices cawing for greater State power are oblivious -- subconsciously or through evasion -- to the definition of stupidity as continuing to do the same thing despite massive evidence that such action does not work. As J. Bradley Jansen of the Center for Technology Policy said in a Washington Post story, "We need to be clear that doing more of the same that failed to prevent this is likely to fail to prevent it in the future."
A sampling of the "quest for power" afflicting our "leaders":
A recent poll indicates that only seven percent of Texans are unwilling to give up any liberties to deal with the problem of terrorists. A chilling statistic. The rest of the nation is not far behind them -- at about 60-70% -- in expressing willingness to ignore Benjamin Franklin's maxim that, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
(And notice how this has become a "War on Terrorism" -- not terrorists -- thereby intellectually distancing us from the reality of the problem. Already we've had the "War on Poverty" vs the War on Poor People it became; the "War on Crime" vs the War on Criminals; the "War on Drugs" vs the War on Drug Users; and the "War on Violence" vs the War on Self-Defenders.)
A plethora of influences contributed to what happened in New York City, Washington, D. C., and Pennsylvania. Our interventionist foreign policy; the beliefs of fanatics who espouse nihilism, religious dictatorship, and, in Ayn Rand's words, hatred of "the good for being good"; and the disparities in wealth between our system of (comparative) freedom, capitalism, and the pursuit of happiness, and the misery and poverty engendered by the collectivism, irrationality, and mysticism of the impoverished nations.
A more immediate contributing factor, however, has become a topic of discussion since the events of September 11, 2001. In a National Review online article, David Kopel and Captain David Petteys, for example, decry the "culture of passivity." L. Neil Smith has written on parallels between the lessons of Columbine and the apparent inaction of most passengers aboard those doomed flights.
Ironically but logically, as the State has swelled in its activism, invading more and more aspects of life, doing more and more things for larger and larger segments of our society, the citizens of this country have shrunk as human beings. They have sat back, handing over the reins of their lives to the State, as helpless as most of the passengers aboard those planes, and "gone along for the ride," in this sad case, literally so.
As Kopel and Petteys point out, imagine a group of WW II vets, fresh from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, in a similar situation. They would undoubtedly have stormed the terrorists, some of the citizens perhaps dying in the attempt. But they would either have regained control of those three planes that struck their targets or gone down fighting, not whimpering in their seats. While the Pennsylvania plane (and perhaps the one that hit the Pentagon) did contain at least some men who were still men -- in the autonomous, take-charge sense of that word -- it is painfully clear that those brave heroes were the exception, not the norm.
When the bulk of the American people are eager to surrender their liberty to the tender mercies of their Washington masters, I am little surprised that our society contains so few people like those men in Athens, Tennessee, who, in 1946, wrested their government back -- at gunpoint -- from the legal thugs oppressing them. Who could conceive of such a bold homage to freedom in this age of "give the criminals what they want" and "obey the authorities" and "let Joe do it"?
For the majority of Americans, the first impulse they "feel" the instant any obstacle looms in their lives is "there ought to be a law." Get the government to "do something" whether the response is appropriate or not. Too many people cannot even conceive of existing without government welfare and subsidies, without State agencies to "protect" them from evil capitalists, without cradle-to-grave health care, retirement plans, and regulatory bodies telling them what they can or cannot do.
As one commentator this past week pointed out, though, the State that so many rely on to protect them has merely traded small tragedies that might result, for example, from recognizing the rights of individuals to arm themselves on planes for large ones like the acts of war that took down the World Trade Center. The State -- and the plethora of citizens who support its spirit-robbing embrace -- is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to real human lives.
But then, the politicians rarely have to pay the price for their ignorance, arrogance, and stupidity.
Ayn Rand pointed out that, "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy...Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." (The Fountainhead, pp. 684, 685.) For evil to win -- whether arising from the evil of radical terrorists or the complacent agents of the State -- good people need only do nothing. They need only to submit to authority and not resist the club being wielded against their collective heads.
Cowering and passivity have weakened us as a society, as individuals. Inaction against State depredations becomes the norm. We should not, however, meekly accede to policies and laws that trample upon our privacy and expose our every move, our every action to the squinting eyes of our would-be "defenders," that leave us powerless to defend ourselves against very real perils.
The defiance exhibited by so many this week lends hope that American self-responsibility and initiative are more dormant than dead. The proof of that prospect, though, will come in what the public will -- and will not -- accept and tolerate in terms of expanded governmental intrusions into our affairs. It is one thing to stand tall against foreign enemies who have defiled a physical symbol of our society and committed mass murder before our eyes. It is quite another to defy the more insidious, homegrown enemy of "well-meaning" politicians who daily defile our Constitution and their oaths of office in the shadowed halls of Congress.
The race we are now so intimate a part of is a race between holding onto -- and increasing -- our freedom...and passively conceding our liberty, our dignity, and our souls to the aims and whims of petty tyrants who yearn one day to graduate to the towers of true dictatorship.
