It's all about freedom

Linux and Main ^ | 9/11/02 | Dennis E. Powell

[dep]

The view from the desktop

by Dennis E. Powell

It's a year later, and the tears come as readily now as they did then.

I was sitting here, at this very desk, in this very chair (itself a survivor of the old New York State Supreme Court Building in lower Manhattan), working on the column that would run the next day on Linux Planet. The phone rang. It was my wife, who was phoning from a meeting at work. There was something on the news about a plane having hit the World Trade Center.

The television had been on in the background, CNBC, but it had been muted for a phone call a few minutes earlier. I turned it up. The story was of some personal interest on a bunch of levels. First, having been peripherally involved in aviation in the New York area over the years, I knew a number of pilots, and the first reports were that a light plane had hit one of the towers. Having flown past them, over the Hudson River, at an altitude well under the height of the tops of the towers themselves, I knew that such a thing was possible. Indeed, like just about everyone else in the news media, I'd discussed that possibility with others.

Second, having been in the news business in New York for 25 years, much of it spent at WOR-AM, and the RKO Radio Networks, and CBS network radio, I'd come to know a great many broadcast engineers. Much broadcasting came out of that mast atop the north tower -- several television and radio stations, though their studios were elsewhere. So there was a good chance that I knew people there, above the point of impact.

And there was the World Trade Center itself. There are lots of people still alive who remember New York City without those towers, but for much of my working life they were the scenery every day. As a reporter, I'd been in the towers dozens of times. I remembered the sensations of riding the boxcar-like express elevators, and the view from the top, which always looked a little strange until one realized that what made it so was that the World Trade Center was missing from the picture.

And, of course, always the approach by car from the south on the New Jersey Turnpike. For a small state, New Jersey is the longest state in the world when you're driving its length to get home. The first sign of home was always the World Trade Center's not-quite-twin towers.

Those were the things that flashed through the mind, in a tenth the time it took to write them down just now, as I watched the smoke from what looked like one hell of an impact for a light airplane. On CNBC, Mark Haines was wondering the same thing, and for a minute it almost felt as if the TV and I were having a conversation. It was as if any semblence of reality were slipping away, just for an instant; almost laughable as the anchor spoke what I was thinking. Then, part of the same continuum, it was horrifying as Haines gave voice to my thoughts again. A second plane! We've just seen a second plane hit the World Trade Center! Reality would be gone for more than an instant. It might not return at all in anything like the form we'd known it.

One of my sisters, Janie, is a doctor in Wisconsin. She is also a pilot and, having grown up in our family, a news junkie. I tried to phone her at home but got no answer, so I sent an email to her pager:

Subject: big news
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:12:08 -0400
From: dep
To: Janie pager

two airplanes, both big jets, have crashed into the world trade center in an apparent terrorist attack. -- dep

It was nine minutes after the second plane had hit. The page found her in the operating room, where she drew the attention of the appropriate people, who hadn't heard. They went to work setting up for and offering services to help with the thousands of injured people who were expected but never would come.

The next hours were unbelievable horror. People who had awakened to a perfectly ordinary day spent their last living seconds wondering if they would feel anything when they hit the concrete, having chosen that sudden death over the slower one presented by the encroaching flames. Then the word, first of "an explosion," then of another kamikaze airliner, at the Pentagon. There was a report, erroneous, it turned out, of an explosion at the State Department. The television showed images of people running, in tears and terror, from the White House and the Capital. Then the television showed the collapse of the first tower.

It was reported as the collapse of "part of the south tower," because no one could imagine that the whole thing would come down, and the cloud of dust and smoke was such that there was no way of seeing just how bad it was. Those in and around New York had a few minutes, but only a few, to ponder how strange it would look now, with just one tower at the World Trade Center.

Almost as background noise came word that there was another airliner missing; soon after there was word of a plane crash in Pennsylvania. It seemed truly odd, perhaps even a coincidence. No one guessed what we later learned: that passengers who had learned through their cellular phones of the attacks, had decided that they might die, but they would not die helpless victims. They had fought the first battle against the moral dwarves who make up the islamicist sect -- not Islamic religion, islamicist sect -- and they had won. We would not know this, though, until much later.

All the airplanes in the country were grounded. It added a surreal silence to our little corner of New England, because there is a major airway intersection nearly overhead, and it's seldom that one cannot hear aircraft. It was a beautiful late summer day, and silent. Video from the scene, shot under that cloud that lingered over lower Manhattan for days, doesn't come close to imparting just how beautiful a day it was.

Late in the afternoon, 7 World Trade Center, a building that would have been a dominating figure on just about any skyline except New York's, collapsed.

The fires would burn into mid-December.

As Americans mostly reacted in shock, outrage, and anger, people on the street suddenly bursting into tears at the site of a collection box for work gloves for recovery workers or a particularly touching headline, others seemed to take delight in the events of September 11, 2001. The blame-America-first crowd seized upon the opportunity. The usual European suspects weighed in -- Europe is like that, forgetting that they tend to get into scraps with each other, expect us to solve their problem (as we have as recently as Kosovo), and then join together to hate us afterwards. (I'm tempted here to mention my belief that the European Union is the result of a barroom bet in Germany in which it is proposed that this time they could get France to surrender without a shot being fired, but I won't. Particularly because the side bet on Great Britain is still open.)

The months wore on and people tried to pretend that things had returned to normal, but they haven't. The voices of the yahoos have grown ever louder, their volume making up for their lack of rational analysis. In April I witnessed a demonstration in Boston, on the street in front of the Copley Square hotel where several of the September 11 hijackers had stayed. In the world of political correctness and academic curled-pinkie snivelgab, sensitivity must be shown to everyone except Americans. That demonstration included various signs proclaiming their bearers as being from MIT, and others which said they were being held by "geeks."

Which is fine. I do not agree with these bozos. I think that there are some people who probably should have no life beyond that which they spend at the keyboard. I think that they are ill-equipped to deal with the basics of life. But more than that, I think that they do not recognize the fundamental paradox that sucks the oxygen out of their posturing and their faux outrage. Yet I would not deny them their wrong-headed say.

It's all about freedom. We in the Linux world talk a lot about freedom. But we never much examine its origins.

Freedom, as we know it, the very idea of personal freedom, the idea of human rights as the rights of individuals, was invented here. Right here on the North American continent in what was to become the United States of America. Yes, others from St. Thomas Aquinas in his consideration of natural law to Edmund Burke in Britain's Parliament discussed it, but we were the ones who did it. We are the ones who codified the "free speech" that we hear so much about. Nobody had ever done anything like that before. We are the ones who made as part of our most fundamental law recognition of the right -- something which we say is endowed by the Creator, not granted by a government -- to worship in any religion, or to recognize no religion at all. We, the great, hated America did it, and we paid for it with our treasure and with our blood. To the extent that it exists elsewhere, it exists because we made it work, because we were the example followed by freedom-loving people and feared by despots.

Wherever you are, if you can speak freely and demonstrate against the policies of your government, you have the United States to thank. You might note, too, that there are lots of people trying to get into America and none trying to get out.

Yes, there are those who will rail against real and imagined injustices over the years; there are plenty of both. But I'll match my country's history on the scales of human freedom against that of any other country, and mine will by far be the one that has done the most, and the fastest, to promote freedom for one and all.

Those who spend their time in outrage against the U.S. might want today to stop and ponder that it is the precedent set by the U.S. that makes it possible for them to do so.

Many young people -- I see them all the time and each day get a mailbox full of their historically inaccurate appraisals -- probably think that by mindlessly signing on to the vaguely trendy rants against America, they will somehow recapture what they have heard of the heady days of the late 1960s and perhaps enjoy some of the perquisites attendant to them. For those misguided persons, a clue: It won't work. It won't save you from the things you've heard about hairy palms and blindness and a sure way to clear up your complexion. That was then. This is now.

We also hear a lot about how the events of a year ago today will somehow be used by "the government," meaning the government of the United States, to spy on us, to read our email, to log every keystroke we type. Don't flatter yourself. Instead, ponder for a moment the sheer volume of traffic on the Internet (and, while you're at it, consider the sheer volume of items that are carried, unsearched, onto airliners). A government ten times the size of that of the U.S. would be needed just to sift through all of it, even with the best computerized search tools available or imaginable. (Beyond that, one of the silliest vanities in the world is the huge number of people who piss away untold bandwidth by encrypting or attaching a PGP or GPG signature to messages that are scarcely of interest to their recipients, let alone anyone else; the height of this is when they post their signed messages to mailing lists!)

Frequently mentioned in the last year -- I've done it myself, I think, and I was wrong in doing so -- is the quote from Franklin that those who surrender some liberty in hope of achieving a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security. It's a catchy quote, and it is dead wrong.

First, it assumes that there is a point of view that is undeserving of liberty. Tempting though it is, this is not true. Liberty is a condition of life unless or until one's behavior forfeits that liberty (hey, even God offers the possibility of hell).

Second, it fails to recognize the realities of life. The vast majority of us devote substantial parts of our lives trading liberty for security. That's what most jobs are: the selling of pieces of our lives for the things that will allow us to live the rest of our lives securely. That's what taking the time to back up our hard drives, or to set up firewalls, is.

Like most generalizations, Franklin's is subject to being yanked out of its context and being applied to situations where it makes no sense. This is one of those situations.

Because the very idea of freedom was attacked last September 11. Does anyone think for a moment that were those who seized the four airplanes, and those who backed them, and those who agree with them, and those nations who think their actions were just, does anyone think for a moment that were they to triumph, we'd enjoy the freedoms we do today?

Not just freedom in America. Freedom throughout the world. When vast threats are encountered, we collectively and individually do things differently.

Much of the world mistrusts the United States because much of the world -- even in Western nations -- fails to understand the United States. We regularly have the opportunity to overthrow the government. It has happened. (Indeed, last September 11 was election day in many places here, among them New York.) Actions that would be all but ignored elsewhere are viewed with caution when they take place here.

That skepticism is fueled, sometimes, when smart people say stupid things, as in Richard M. Stallman's brain fart in his statement in response to last September 11, which was to the effect that it was too bad that lots of people died, but it would become a tragedy if it interfered with his agenda.

Of course, the killers of September 11, 2001, would have been perfectly happy to cash Richard M. Stallman's check, as they would have been delighted to kill any -- no, all -- of us. Those who think that September 11 was a good idea still would. Do you suppose that were we to send RMS to a Wahabbi mosque in Saudi Arabia, he would be able to bring them over with his idea of free as in speech?

Freedom is under assault and in a far broader way than our little software sense of it. The irony of it all is that if the U.S. triumphs, over the objections of Europe, which expects our attention for its wars, and over the objections of those here who have no idea of the price that was paid for their freedom to say really stupid things, all that those nations and persons will remember is how we, who were brutally attacked a year ago today, might have read their email.

[dep]

i wrote this, and i'm gonna catch hell for it. anyone who agrees or disagrees, please come on over and let your view be known.

[taxcontrol]

Amen my AMERICAN Brother.