Patdowns, black outs and privileges

In our society, the battle between security and personal liberty is a constant struggle.

And while we claim to be a nation of freedom and liberty, we allow blatant violations of personal liberty on a nearly daily basis.

Police can enter your home, often without a warrant, shoot your caged dog and arrest you, even erroneously, with near impunity.

Just look at the effects of our war on drugs.

They now have technology that allows them to instantaneously scan every license plate they pass, including those on parked cars, thus essentially allowing your every movement to be tracked.

Yet, if you attempt for your own security and posterity to record the police, you can be arrested and the tape seized in many parts of the country.

Additionally, the idea that driving in this country is a privilege, not a right, doled out by the state, is blindly accepted and completely unchallenged.

In a nation with nearly no transportation infrastructure, we still gladly accept the government’s control over our liberty to move freely, even just to get to a job stacking pants for $7 an hour at Old Navy, all in the name of security.

As a nation, many believe that so long as we are deterred from using profanity in columns and on TV, that if there is no nudity, sex and (to a lesser degree) violence in movies and video games, children will turn into nice, productive people and not foul-mouthed, violent, sex obsessed maniacs.

And to do this, it is necessary for the parent advocates to control other’s liberty to view what they choose, all in the name of the children.

A major factor in why marijuana remains illegal in this country is that, in the name of the children’s “security,” drugs must not be available legally, as though that removes the spectre of drug access from the realm of possibility.

Because of this delusion of absolute security, hundreds of thousands of adults remain in prison. Because the children must be “secure,” adults in this country do not have the liberty to decide what to put in their own bodies.

With all these various manners in which our liberties are put at stress each day, a pat down when you walk into an airport is the last thing we should be complaining about.

There certainly are problems with the TSA and how it administers these pat downs, but everything else I’ve mentioned merits far more attention than another person’s hand on you to check for a weapon.

And considering that we believe from childhood in these illusions of absolute security, having a system that attempts to allow Americans to continue their illusions of this security is the natural result.

And as much as Americans complain about this non-issue, if another attempted attack were to happen tomorrow, they would once again find a way to say that the government isn’t doing enough to protect us. Because when the chips are down, Americans have a long history of unfortunately choosing the illusion of more security over personal liberty.


E-mail: mrstraw@indiana.edu