This morning I was reading an article written by Jim Shepherd and found on Outdoorwire, reflecting back a bit on the events of 9/11, twelve years ago today. It is human to mourn the loss of life, it is also human, or used to be, to learn from the events of the short history provided us by those events.
A valuable lesson, that I fear will not be properly learned, is the rush to destroy individual liberty for the sake of “national security.” Liberty makes us secure, therefore seeking to limit liberty becomes the antithesis to security. But we blindly bow and follow.
In Shepherd’s article he states the following:
Recently in Missouri, I pulled into the parking lot of the original Bass Pro Shops when an official-looking government vehicle pulled up. “Got any guns in there,” the driver asked. I pointed down to the sign on the door that reads “No weapons stored onboard” and asked him what government agency he represented.
He hemmed and hawed around, and finally admitted that neither he nor his companion were law enforcement officers. They were TSA “Agents” on the lookout for suspect conduct or behavior. When I asked them if I was considered “suspect” simply because of the vehicle I drove, they told me not to be defensive and drove off.
On the surface, one may ask why these thugs were in the Bass Pro Shops’ parking lot bothering people. It does go much deeper than that. Wasn’t the TSA, under Homeland Security, invented, we were told, to screen passengers at airports? After all, planes from airports were used to fly into and destroy buildings and people and lives.
President Bush, in his deliberate rush to limit our freedoms, created another agency whose goals are nothing more than to limit our freedom and lessen our security while making us believe it is keeping us safer.
Were we told that 12 years after 9/11, when things like the Patriot Act, the creation of Homeland Security, all for the sake of national security, TSA agents would be all over the country, far from our airports, setting up roadblocks and harassing customers in store parking lots? How much more anti-liberty can that be?
And yet who speaks out against this? We have been so programmed to blindly follow government, especially when they say it’s for the good of our safety.
Lessons not learned and they certainly are not cheap.
