I have worried about another terrorist attack happening here in the U.S. or overseas. What will the terrorists do next? They have gotten more and more sophisticated while the authorities have not seemed to keep up – as in Mumbai. It has been reported that the police there were vastly out gunned by the terrorists. Also 9/11 was not the first time that terrorist activity has graced our shores, domestic terrorist attacked on April 19, 1995 with the bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. Details came out after that, the perpetrators had visited several federal buildings in different cities in deciding which one to bomb. At the time I was living in Des Moines, IA which was one on the list and I worked near it. Then we have all the work place, shopping and school shootings all perpetrated by people carrying out their own little forms of ‘jihad’ not to mention drunk drivers on the road that could run you over. So are we ever really safe getting out of bed in the morning? (I won’t mention planes falling out of the sky onto your house now…)
In a post 9/11 U.S. it does seem that we have let our civil rights slip away some, just so that we will feel safer. The Patriot Act gives the government sweeping powers to fight terrorism but many of the provisions run counter to the Constitution. Things like innocence until proven guilty, limits on government’s power of search and seizer of property and separation of powers ect. Back in August 2003 the Bush administration released a report that detailed civil rights abuses committed in the implementation of the Patriot Act which got a lot of press coverage but at the time got very little public discussion. Although now I do hear more of a discussion and it seems that we as a nation are waking up and seeing that our fear might have been used against us in order to distract us from other things going on.
I agree with Lawrence in the hope that we do not give up our rights because of fear. We need to be vigilant because I can see that before 9/11 we had let our guard down but I think in some ways the pendulum has swept back to far the other way. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Author John Mueller explains how the terrorism industry thrives on exaggeration
Lewis Black on why we are so safe....
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