Juneteenth: Knowing When We're Free--or Not

Conservatives, over the years, have rightly believed that government has a natural inclination to grow and usurp powers that properly belong to the local community, the family or the individual. They have fought to protect our freedoms and have been wary of the government’s great thirst for power—often in the name of efficiency.

Liberals also have fought to protect individual freedoms from being eroded by faceless bureaucrats or by popular passions and fears. In truth, liberals and classic conservatives often meet at a kind of libertarian position that agrees that our freedoms must be actively safeguarded and not just from foreign enemies, but also from well-meaning friends.

Fear is not freedom’s friend. This is why our freedoms are most under threat from our government when our leaders and we are most afraid. Sometimes fear is a card that is played cynically. But often it is a natural consequence of real dangers.

9-11 was a terrible tragedy, a wake up call to the fact that some people want us dead. We were right in fearing that they will come again. We are not paranoid in believing that there are sleeper cells already here and that thousands of people are willing to trade their lives for ours.

This is a very different model for war than we lived with during the Cold War where we were contending with a state and not a worldwide network. States have ambitions—survival usually being one of them. Citizens may be willing to die for their cause, but death is normally a side affect.

For many terrorists today, their deaths’ are not side effects but primary tools of warfare. Today’s terrorists operate free of the consequences that once held states hostage. During the Cold War, if we were attacked, our enemies knew that we would respond. Terrorists, unlike states, often do not have return addresses; this ties our hands and leaves us without a good theory of deterrence.

We naturally and appropriately shift our attention to the home front and finding cells already here and stopping plots that are aimed at our homeland. This is all understandable and rational. I, as a card-carrying liberal, would have been every bit as determined and focused as former Attorney General John Ashcroft was on 9-12. I would have been out of my mind with rage and fear and swear never to allow anything like 9-11 again. I would have tried to do anything I deemed necessary to protect my country and to hell with the niceties of civil liberties. Civil liberties would have been to my mind irrelevant in a burning building, a mere abstraction in a crumbling and smoldering world. Had my portfolio been the protection of the homeland, I would have become the ACLU's worst nightmare. I do not expect those charged with defending us to see both sides and be of a liberal nature.

I do expect them to obey the law and to be stayed by other voices that provide both context and a reminder of why we fight and what we wish to protect besides our lives.

I accept that our protectors want, and not necessarily cynically, to erode our freedoms. I expect that other forces in our society will check them and balance their understandable passion and focus with a sense of our historical values.

I expect our leaders to assert maximum power to protect us. I also expect that I, along with most other Americans, will accept some erosion of our historic freedoms. This has always been true in time of war—and we have always won our freedoms back.

However, we are in a different kind of war today. Without a state to fight, a territory to conquer, or an enemy who can sign a peace treaty, we cannot know when the emergency has passed. We don’t know how long to accept the fear cards that are being dealt out in great numbers.

In the first year post 9-11 we understood a certain amount of racial and ethnic profiling. Maybe we didn’t like it, but we accepted it—like the revocation of Habeas Corpus by Lincoln. We understood the need to wire tap phones and the Internet, but felt somewhat assured by the need for a warrant—even if only from a secret court. We got that prisoners of war didn’t get all the protections of the American Constitution. We may even have been willing to turn, if not a blind eye, an astigmatic gaze, on “stress questioning” (torture to you and me). Fear made us tolerate actions opposed to our values.

However, today with warrantless wiretaps and the unreliable information coming from Washington and the rushed and unread Patriot Act, it is hard to know which abridgements of freedom and privacy to accept and which to fight. Both absolute surrender to government and absolute resistance seem unreasonable and unsafe. We should be having a non-partisan conversation across the political spectrum. We should talk about our freedoms before it is too late.

It took 18 months for Texan Blacks to learn that they had been freed. The question that haunts me is how long might it take us to learn that we are no longer free?

©2007 Jonathan Dobrer