| I'd quote Franklin on safety vs liberty, but I've been told on other threads that ole Ben was a good guy but he's irrelevant because he never faced the kind of "dire situation" we find ourselves in today. Makes you wonder....
There is something far worse that could happen here, that would make today's measures look like the Fourth Amendment. Regardless of who has been mailing the anthrax around, we know that Mohammed Atta & Co. were looking into crop dusters, had books on various kinds of spraying equipment, and so on. We've also discovered anthrax labs in the left-behinds when al-qa'ida fled from Kabul. If one of these Abduls ever succeeds in spraying 100 pounds of this stuff over an American city, and kills three or four hundred thousand people, you can kiss your civil liberties goodbye. The measures taken in the wake of something like that would make today's measures look like pinpricks by comparison, and people will be clamoring for more. If two such incidents went down with a million or more dead, the vast majority of the American people would cheer the formation of a police state, just to make it stop. We need to be careful what we wish for here. We could "defend our liberties" right into the grave if we make it so easy for terrorists that they do something that brings a police state down on our heads... by popular demand. Should the FBI be spying on churches? You bet. Two of the guys who hijacked the planes got their start in America from a mullah. The guy who planned the first WTC bombing was also a mullah. If mosques are off limits, we've essentially created a "cone of silence" for Islamic terrorists, right in the middle of our cities. I don't think we need to be so nice. |
I've sadly concluded that this is not the time to worry about breaking a few heads. It makes me uneasy, but so far the really serious Bad News has been confined to non-citizens. Yeah, there's a slippery slope there, and we do need to worry about that, but so far, I'm inclined to look the other way. Here's why: