I think 3000 people is not a reason to give up my civil liberties. My father fought in the Pacific, partly to protect "our way of life"- and our way of life includes the freedom not to be spied on as if we were citizens of Soviet Russia. I don't even know how many people died in WWII, but the whole idea of their deaths was that our freedoms were worth the deaths- if they were worth those deaths, then why change the system for 3000- EVEN if you stood under the building and watched them jump, even if your grandchild was tossed out the window. Just because you have an emotional response to something, that doesn't mean we throw out our civil liberties.
Someone once told he wished that terrorists would blow up the West Coast, so I could "understand" the problem better. Let me just tell you, I hope I'm not such a weenie that I would change my POV simply because my family were the victims. Whether it's my family, or yours, or someone else's, a free society will always be more dangerous in some ways than a repressive one (but only in some ways- and if you look at the number of our citizens behind bars, you can see that the government can be quite dangerous indeed)- and quite frankly I welcome the danger if it means we keep the freedom not to be spied on, and not to be followed by the government, even though we have done nothing to warrant such scrutiny. |
