Land of the free, only if home of the brave
By Richard D. Erlich
To put the matter in an old-fashioned, satiric, but nonsexist way, AMERICANS ARE PUPPIES!!! Putting that assertion into respectable language: Few Americans are willing to take personal risks, even small ones, for liberty and decency.
The Declaration of Independence lists life as the first of the "unalienable rights" that we humans establish governments to preserve, and the Preamble to the US Constitution lists defense as one of the purposes of the US government.
Still, it was and remains misleading when Presidents Bush and Obama put quite so much emphasis on their job to protect the American people. The President is commander in chief of the military forces of the United States, and the faithful execution of the Presidential office includes protecting Americans, but the President isn't commander-in-Chief of the United States, and the President's first job isn't to protect Americans but America: "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" (Article II).
The Declaration of Independence has life as a right, but follows it with rights to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness." We humans establish governments to for protection but also to secure liberty and to create the political space to pursue our own good in our own ways. If you want self-protection as the central justification for government, don't go to Thomas Jefferson but to Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan (1651).
Without relying on arguments from divine authority or restricting himself to kings, Hobbes establishes something like Divine Right for any sovereign. Hobbes gives us a creation myth where to protect themselves from each other -- to get out of a state of nature where human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" -- humans established governments to end a war of all against all. As the price of safety, they surrendered all rights except protection.
Going a bit beyond Hobbes -- If protection is the over-riding goal, most Americans would do best in an absolutist police-state. If protection trumps all other concerns, Americans should have no qualms about using torture if, on balance, it seems expedient to do so to protect Americans.
"Freedom isn't free" as the truism goes, and neither is decency. If we wish to preserve the liberty we inherited, we must be willing to take risks; if we wish to bequeath liberty to America's children, we must be willing to put those children at risk. If we're to behave decently and "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," including our Bill of Rights, we must take risks.
Let's say most of our Federal legislators are right and Americans are unwilling to imprison convicted or suspected terrorists even in maximum-security prisons in our area codes or maybe even time zones. Not even if that unwillingness would prohibit giving terrorist suspects trials. Not even if that unwillingness keeps Guantanamo open as a prison and a blot on America's reputation.
If we won't expose ourselves to even small risks, we are puppies, if not quite cowards, at least insufficiently valiant to live long as free and decent people.
Former Vice President Cheney says that a little torture saved many American lives. How is he so sure-- and how many lives? If we're talking hundreds of thousands of lives, I'd be willing to sacrifice decency and some American honor. I'm not a rigid ideologue nor so much with the Christians and classical Anarchists that I'd argue that evil should never be done to prevent greater evil; but I'm also not a total puppy. How many lives, Mr. Cheney, and how do you know?
President Obama talks about preventive detention of terrorist suspects we might not be able to convict even with military tribunals. For how long, such detention, Mr. President? How many men? What sort of precedent do we set for, say, "domestic terrorists" like environmental activists?
I can't believe we're risking lives in very large numbers in releasing long-held terrorism suspects into the United States -- not if the FBI tries to keep track of them and to use them to uncover terrorist cells. Not if their release decreases at least slightly the intensity of hatred for us.
I'm far from brave myself, but I'm willing to have a few more tightly-surveilled potential terrorists in the USA, to add to our home-grown, all-American variety (no, not environmentalist tree-spikers but more like the "Minute Men" who left the message, "Tell Erlich the cross-hairs are on the back of his neck").
Benjamin Franklin warned his contemporaries in 1759, "Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Preserving American liberty as enshrined in the Bill of Rights is worth taking risks and taking casualties, including civilian casualties. Preserving decency is worth equal sacrifice.
If we allow ourselves to do evil out of fear, we are puppies, and rabid puppies to boot.
Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor at Miami University, Oxford, OH, retired in Ventura County, California.