By Richard D. Erlich
"Freedom isn't free" is a true statement that became a cliché, so we no longer think about what it means, nor its implications.
We need to think about it.
John F. Kennedy said that we Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden [...] to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Within a few years, a bitter observation had it that the world would be better off if Lyndon Johnson was a more consistent Machiavellian and hadn't applied such Kennedy-esque idealism to Vietnam. Ideals can be pushed too far when the cost is human lives.
Usually, though, people go too far in the other direction, arguing that "If it saves just one life, it" -- all sorts of "it's" -- is justified. Safety can be idealized and presented as an infinite good, and that, too, is a problem.
I have heard people say, "Nothing is more important than protecting our troops?" If nothing is more important than protecting our troops, we should keep them out of war zones. If they're in combat on a justified mission, accomplishing the mission is more important than their safety.
Similarly, George W. Bush has said that his main duty as President was protecting the American people. Actually, what a president swears most specifically to do is "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." The president's job includes protecting Americans, but his primary job is protecting America, which can be something different. To protect America, the president may have to send to their deaths American troops.
Civilians, too, need to take risks, and the cost of freedom includes civilian deaths.
Freedom can be dangerous. I'm a life-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but I'll tell you that most Americans, most of the time -- even most members of most minority groups -- would be safer in a police state.
Part of the cost of freedom is the blood of Americans who would not have died or been wounded or maimed if we lived in a police state.
Racism complicates things, but most of us would be safer -- at least initially -- in an America without the Bill of Rights: disarmed (no Amendment 2) with constant surveillance (Amendment 4), and no troublemakers free to openly spread dangerous doctrines (Amendment 1). Most of us would be safer in a country without trials and legal technicalities, where the authorities could just throw known or suspected evil-doers into jail indefinitely and torture them for information -- or just to break them -- or, for "the worst of the worst" of the evil, send out death squads to kill them (Amendments 5-8).
Freedom isn't free, and neither is safety, and a fair number of American civilians seem willing to pay high prices in military blood for freedom, and the blood of foreign civilians, but not take too many risks for themselves or their kids. Many of us will trade a whole bunch of freedom for at least a sense of safety.
And to get done other handy things.
If you don't believe this, check out a sampling of American schools and then ask about bringing some medical marijuana with you on a commercial air flight. Kids don't have the same rights as adults, but to preserve their safety we've made a lot of schools very like prisons -- complete with "lockdowns" -- and have quietly dropped critical thinking and Civics as part of the "basics" kids should know. These practices have contributed to a generation or two with little sense of a right to privacy, and little knowledge of or dedication to most of the US Bill of Rights.
Oh -- and if you openly bring marijuana of any sort onto a commercial air flight, you'll be arrested: extraordinary laws to protect us against terrorists are used against the most ordinary sorts of crimes.
We need to take seriously "Freedom isn't free," and liberals, conservatives, and civil libertarians need to talk openly and honestly about the price they are willing to pay, and ask others to pay, for freedom. We need to discuss how much courage we can demand from ordinary people.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, "The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men -- the right to be let alone." If we are to maintain that right, we Americans need to carefully balance the claims of liberty and security -- and take more risks. As Steven Stills said, we must "Find the cost of freedom," and be willing to pay.
Richard D. Erlich is currently the main content provider for the Clockworks 2 wiki, which people interested in science fiction should visit and help build since, even including the hard-copy, hard-cover Clockworks [1] (Greenwood Press), is a radically incomplete List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF.