Yossarius's Dungeon
Killing Us with Safety


When did it happen that death became the worst thing that could happen to you? I mean, didn't there used to be a time when people valued their integrity over their continued existence? I guess not. More likely, people used to be more afraid of going to Hell then they were of dying, and so pretended to integrity and morality in hopes of fooling God into letting them squeak by into Heaven. So much for the good old days.

Still, this country was at least partially founded on the rhetoric that it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees. We seem to be a long way from that way of thinking now, don't we? It appears now that we're much more concerned with cowering with our wives and children in front of our High Definition TV's, desperately hoping that someone else will make the world a better place for us, so that we can go back to our drab, meaningless little lives. Who "someone else" is no one seems to know, except that politicians would have us believe that it's them, and are willing to spend millions of dollars on commercials to convince us of exactly that.

So, you hear all this media tripe now about Safety. "How to Keep America Safe." "How to Keep your Children Safe." Public opinion polls asking people how much inconvenience they are willing to accept for safety. So on and so forth. Everyone seems to agree that this is such a high priority. It's practically become illegal to even question this belief. At least, I've not heard anyone do so. So now I'm about to.

Government imposed safety has no place in a free society. That is the cost of freedom. In a free society, you can pursue an academic curiosity in bomb-making, and so long as you don't actually blow anything up, no one in authority will start recording your phone calls. In a free society, you can own a weapon that is designed exclusively to kill other human beings, and so long as you don't start using it indiscriminantly, no one is going to beat down your door to take it from you. These things don't happen, not because the government is more tolerant, but because the people that make up that society are less tolerant of the government. People decide as a group that living with these potential threats is better than the alternative.

The question you might be asking now may be, "So what if the American people decide that living with these potential threats is NOT better than the alternative?" That may be the case. But just keep in mind that all this new "safety in the name of freedom" rhetoric that's going around now is all bullshit. There's no such thing. Government-mandated safety is just tyranny with a pretty name. And if this is where America is going, we will become the antithesis of what we used to be; after fighting and bleeding and starving for years and years to be free, we'll be throwing freedom away because it doesn't come in a pretty package.




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