Do you feel safer?
“Security” is everywhere — yet are we more secure?
Today’s a good day to re-read Molly Ivins’s classic essay, “The Fun’s in the Fight.”
All the way back in 1993, Ivins wrote:
[I]sn’t that what we keep doing in this country, over and over again? We get scared so bad — about the communist menace or illegal immigration or AIDS or pornography or violent crime, some damn scary thing — that we hurt ourselves. We take the odd notion that the only way to protect ourselves is to give up some of our freedom — just trim a little, hedge a bit, and we’ll all be safe after all.
Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever onward and upward are dead damned wrong. Many a time freedom has been rolled back — and always for the same sorry reason: fear.
I’ve only seen more fear — not to mention trimming and hedging on what really matters — over the past two decades.
At what point do we try to find a different way to handle ourselves?
Colin Steele 