hmm
I found one of my posts Michael found so upsetting- I still agree with me, and not him. Seems to me those not willing to sacrifice their own loved ones here, for their own freedoms here at home, should not be sacrificing other people's children in Iraq for much less tangible rewards (and the possible creation of an Islamic state)- go figure, I would have thought my POV was just the POV of a freedom loving patriot. Seems to me if your POV changes just because you are a victim, your POV wasn't very well founded, and your values weren't very strong (and it might be fine not to have strong values- I've no idea. I certainly don't have a problem with people who don't want to sacrifice, as long as they don't want other people to sacrifice for them- but I'm not sure why being willing to sacrifice for something you believe in is a bad thing.):
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.
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