… and found wanting …

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Ben Franklin

This New York Times op-ed is making the blog and response rounds. The backstory behind the op-ed: an alcoholic mother publicly and violently lost her temper (is screaming and throwing your blackberry ‘violent’?) in the middle of the airport when she found her seat had been given away. She was cuffed and booked by airport officials – and then (get this) died in custody due to some weird condition nobody (her included) bothered telling the police about. The op-ed goes on in typical “bleeding-heart fashion” (yes, thank you, Dave :) about how we’re just missing our social agape these days, and if someone – anyone!! – had just put an arm around the poor woman, she’d still be alive…

gag me, please. All of us have had our bags searched, our underwear laughed at, our reading material scanned, our personal items touched by complete strangers. The rest of us have put up with worse indignities, without losing our tempers… Right?

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That’s what I want to talk about here, not this article specifically. Sure, the woman was an unstable alcoholic. Sure, she died. But what happened to her has certainly happened to the rest of us.

Three months ago, I went through Miami security on my way home from South America. In my bag I had (among other things) a little stone fertility god – penis included – and a couple jars of a carmel-like Argentine sweet called dulce de leche. I had to strip down to pants, a tshirt and socks to get through the scanner, and then these two security guys – probably my age, 23, 25, something – went through everything I had with me. They pulled the sweets out and nixed them instantly, and then took out the god and started laughing. And I laughed with them. Wanna know why? – because I didn’t want them to take it away from me. I was fucking pissed – my stuff, my sweets, a present for my grandmother! – but I didn’t want them to toss the rock, too. They had all the power, and I was standing there in my socks with a lot of good memories associated with that particular piece of marble.
And so I teased them back, said a few sexy/racy things. Almost got the dulce back, too. Walked away thinking, “at least they didn’t declare the god contraband or something…”

… So what the hell, people?!?!

Satiated people have nothing to gain and everything to lose, and let’s face it; we are satiated here, on everything – goods, services, privileges, media, news (but not ideas or ideals). Who wants to argue over a fat, greasy finger in with their lacy thongs when they might get on a terrorist watch list over the issue?

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We bend (over) to fit the circumstances.

… I think we have to face something as a nation: Freedom and safety – like, perhaps, freedom and equality – are diametrically opposed values. They’re opposites.

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Give this a think:

• If everyone’s free to do what they want, some will do better or worse than others, and there’s no equality.
• If we enforce equality, most people aren’t free to do what they want.
• Ditto with safety; for perfect safety, we all need to be audited by the IRS at least once a year, allow our every communication to be monitored, provide biometric information to the government and wear tiny electronic radios to show our every movement.

We’d get all the terrorists that way, for sure, and all the prostitutes and their pimps and their clients, and all the illegal immigrants, and the people who watch kiddie porn or cheat on their spouses, the murderers, the drug abusers, the people who cheat on their income taxes, the people who drive too fast on the highway. We’d get all the bad guys.

No problem, right? I mean, if I’m not doing anything wrong, how could it hurt? Only a bad citizen doesn’t want their wires tapped!

Social networks have historically existed both in the matrix and the interstices of law and government; we all go to church on Sunday, but then I take food to the neighbor’s kid who got herself knocked up. I don’t rat on my cube-mate when s/he comes in late to work, and then I expect him or her to stay mum when I leave at 4:30, five minutes after the boss. I take an extra cup of coffee without putting in my dollar, but I pay an extravagant sum to the neighbor’s kid who’s fundrasing for the soccer team – and, perhaps, by the way, her dad brings coffee to the office. Perhaps I drive too fast, but I mow my neighbor’s lawn. We all need to feel we’re gaming the system, just a little, and sometimes we all need to feel we’re making it better, but off the record.

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Which brings me to this:

• Freedom lies in our ability to self-regulate – both socially and personally.

• Law exists to prevent willful and gross manipulation of the system. (whether that’s war, murder, theft, whatever –).

• Law (and government, for that matter) should provide outside stability so we can participate in social networking and regulation.

• Law does not exist to provide recompense for stress, accidents, or spilled coffee.

We cannot and will never be both perfectly free and perfectly safe.

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Back to my sexy-jokes interlude with the guys at the airport: The U.S. government has decided it can divest itself of care for our dignity and privacy in the interest of our safety and security.

I – personally, and I bet you too – have decided I am willing to collude with “a certain amount” of humiliation and non-privacy, so I can keep my stuff and catch my flights.

I care more about my stuff than my dignity.

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Do I deserve my freedom? Do you?