Notes of
Concern…
…Jackson Blair
Let Us Reason Together
In the beginning, individuals lived a lonely and dangerous
life.
Along the way they determined to group together primarily
for safety. Hence the well-worn saying: there is safety in numbers.
Living in community permitted specialization. You could
afford to be the village blacksmith because someone else in the village was the
baker. Well, you get the idea.
Fast forward to 2013.
The village is now threatened.
Living in community no longer seems to provide enough
safety.
We feel threatened and we are worried. We have tasked our
government with providing our safety. But some of us are not so happy with the
methods the government has felt they needed to use to meet our expectations of
safety.
The always present conundrum: does the end justify the
means?
We ask ourselves what we can do to be safe again. And the
answer is obvious. We must give more power to the people who can protect us. In
our world this suggests we must give more power to the government.
You and I cannot protect us against terrorists or nuclear
weapons. It does not matter how strong we are, how many weapons we possess in
our homes, or how many alarm systems we have in our houses.
The government understands polls.
The government knows we are afraid and concerned.
The government knows if it is to be retained in power or
returned to power it must alleviate our fears.
Now pay close attention for it is here that the cheese
begins to bind. It is here that everyone gets his or her undies in a wad. It is
here where the tires meet the road. It is here that we begin to parse exactly
what we are willing to cede to the government in order to be safe.
By and large there are two schools of thought.
The first school is willing to give up certain freedoms in
order to have more security.
The second school finds freedom too valuable to trade for
security.
Here then is the predicament in which we find ourselves.
Reasonable people can disagree on important things. This issue is one of them.
I hear someone saying “compromise, compromise!” but no one
in either school of thought wants to compromise. If safety is your primary
concern you are not going to settle on partial safety.
If freedom is your main concern you are not going to give
away, say, 50% of your freedoms.
So how do we achieve a resolution to these concerns?
The man who knows the answer could easily be elected
president.
The man who does not know the answer will not be successful
as president.
As with so many seemingly insolvable problems this one will
be solved in time. It will be solved when another terrorist attack that takes
many lives reminds us that we just cannot bear the cost of not being safe.
If we are greeted with multiple attacks across a wide swath
of our territory, we will demand action from the government.
I believe the government knows that this would be the result
of permitting further attacks. They know the pressure would be on them to
satisfy us. With this in mind, it is easier for them to prevent such attacks
from happening in order to keep us feeling reasonably safe and to lessen the
chance we will be in the streets demanding retaliation against enemies real or
imagined.
Students of history know that this nation wished to be neutral
in WWII until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. After that you had a hard
time finding sentiment for further neutrality.
After the attacks of “9-11” the president had really high
approval ratings and there was strong sentiment to go after the attackers.
So both the Bush and Obama administrations, privy to the
secret briefings about how bad things really are and how bad they could become,
found common ground on how to handle the situation.
They gather information, evaluate the information, act on the
information and hope for the best.
At the moment this column is being written, there are many
in America who would like to restrict the gathering of information.
There is great danger in this thinking.
And there is great danger in thinking that once we give up
certain rights that were guaranteed us in the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights we will ever get them back.
The situation in America today is not very encouraging.
It is appropriate that each of us gives this a lot of
thought and that we be prepared to go to the ballot box and vote our conscience
because these decisions will be made for us by our elected representatives and
these decisions have far reaching consequences.
The
writer welcomes your comments, ideas and suggestions.
Please
take a moment to share your views on the topic by emailing
www.blair-notes.blogspot.com
For further information: jacksonblair@gmail.com
