I've come to doubt that most Americans know what it means to live in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. As far as I can tell, most American certainly don't act like it. Instead, most Americans seem to act as if they lived in, say, Russia, during the days of Stalin's excesses. What bothers me most about that is that most Americans don't seem to mind.
This is often noticable where I live, here in Utah, where the religious establishment, the Mormons, likes to treat Constitutional protections with a nod and a wink whenever they turn out to be inconvenient. Prayers and other religious ritual at public meetings? Certainly. Censorship of dissenting opinions? By all means. Anyone who complains is cast as a trouble maker, as someone who is just trying to annoy. After all, no harm is done.
While Utah's treatment of the First Amendment's provisions is mostly idiosyncratic, it is also representative of Americans' attitudes towards the Constitution in general. Constitutional protections are something we profess to be proud of, and we like to boast of our rights and freedoms. Our current war on terrorism is usually characterized as a war on those who hate our freedoms.
But we seem to have no problems with stripping away Constitutional protections where they are inconvenient. Foreigners have rarely enjoyed protection in this country. For example, by treaty - which is covered by our Constitution - foreigners are supposed to have the opportunity to contact their embassy when they are imprisoned in this country. This right is more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Now that we're at war with terrorism, foreign nationals are routinely imprisoned and held without trial or prospect of release. The Bush administration has declared that Constitutional provisions don't apply to foreigners at all, and most Americans don't even flinch at that ridiculous assertion.
Many Americans seem to be of the opinion that it's OK to remove rights from foreigners. Those are the rights of Americans, and only Americans deserve them. Somehow we've deluded ourselves into believing that our rights are therefore invulnerable.
Of course, when Americans are accused of being terrorists, that's different. Take their rights away! But what if they haven't done anything? No matter, they were going to. (I thought the Precrime Unit of Minority Report was just science fiction?) Suppose an American in a foreign country is suspected of terrorism, can the CIA just execute them, without a trial? Our administration says so, and they've done it already: one of the accused terrorists killed by the CIA in Yemen was an American citizen. While the CIA has declined to say whether or not they knew that their attack would kill an American, American officials in interviews about the attack in Yemen have put American citizens everywhere on notice that they will now be subject to summary execution if the CIA were to suspect them of terrorism.
Terrorism isn't the only case where this happens. Take, for example, the accused Washington area snipers, Mohammed and Malvo. People are so sure that these two are guilty (and I'm sure, myself), that they are already planning their execution. No one seems to be the least bit concerned how Malvo came under the influence of Mohammed. More importantly, no one seems to be at all concerned about fine details like the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. Authorities questioned Malvo for hours without his lawyer, even turning away Malvo's court appointed guardian who attempted to intervene. The protections of the Constitution are suddenly regarded as legal fictions, inconvenient impediments to having justice done.
What's ironic about all this is that just a couple of years ago, during the census, many Americans complained about the information that they were asked to supply. They pointed out that during WWII the Census Bureau provided census information to help the authorities find Japanese Americans, who were just then the targets of unconstitutional treatment. But the census was before 9-11, so people worried about their freedoms. Just as with the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, Americans since 9-11 are willing to ignore the Constitution. The Constitution apparently only matters when we don't feel scared.
Which brings me back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Many American know those words from the national anthem, written almost 200 years ago by Francis Scott Key. Kids like to gleefully point out that it's sung to the tune of an old British drinking song. (British drunks must have an excellent singing voice!) But whatever the tune, it seems to me that Francis Scott Key understood one thing about America: to be free, we must be brave, because when we're afraid our leaders only too easily strip away our freedoms, and we seem willing to let them.
Yes it's hard to be brave when you've watched two jumbo jets fly into the World Trade Centers. Sure it's easy to be afraid when nine people were randomly murdered as they went about their daily tasks in Maryland and Virginia. And it doesn't help when our leaders do everything in their power to panic us further. But our freedoms are a precious and fragile thing. If you have the chance, find a Japanese American who survived internment during WWII. Or talk to someone who got dragged in to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the fifties. Chat with African Americans who before 1965 (and often even years later) were denied basic rights because of the color of their skin. These offenses happened recently, in our parents' lifetimes, and in our own. We must learn that our freedoms are only protected as long as we are vigilant and brave. We, as Americans, must be willing to protect the rights of even those whom we consider the most vile of criminals, if our freedoms are not to be traded away for the sake of convenience or security.