Vigilance

By Crispin Sartwell

Here's the way Thomas Jefferson put it: "the condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." Barry Goldwater said pretty much the same thing in relation to the Cold War. And now it's back, as we prosecute the "war on terror" through "homeland security."

Especially vigilant is one Eunice Stone, a nurse in Georgia, who believed she heard two Moslem men in a Shoney's planning a terrorist attack on Miami. "If people thought September 11 was something, wait till September 13," is what she thought she overheard, and she called the law. After driving through a tollbooth in southern Florida without paying, the men were captured and their cars searched by robot, as Alligator Alley - an east/west artery through the Everglades - was closed for the better part of a day.

But there was nothing in the cars, and the men taken into custody have emerged as mild-mannered medical students who want to heal, not hurt people.

Perhaps they were joking about terrorism, though they have denied that. And Eunice Stone herself has said that if she's wrong she apologizes, but that she'd do the same thing again.

Meanwhile, Ayman Gheith and Kambiz Butt have been told they're not welcome at the Miami hospital where they were headed to work. Surely the two are going to have rather difficult lives for awhile, though they have been released without charges.

It seemed that the events of 9.11.01 were too horrific to be the subject of jokes, but people started joking about it immediately. Eminem appeared in a video as Osama, boogieing to rap in a cave. One of the best-selling t-shirts on tshirthell.com, it seems, is "I [plane] NY" (as opposed to "I [heart] NY"). Sick, perhaps, but also not terrorism. In fact, it is a familiar human impulse to joke about what scares or overwhelms us, largely as a way of cutting the demon down to size.

But since the very idea of knocking over the World Trade towers with an airplane would have sounded like a joke 372 days ago, perhaps Eunice Stone was right to do what she did. After all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

On the other hand, though, the cost of eternal vigilance is freedom. Paranoid people aren't free.

Thus, we find ourselves in a situation fraught with irony. Almost every step we take to "defend our freedom" reduces that freedom, makes for a more regimented, systematized society. We already seem to be subject to detention without trial, and soon we may have to carry a national ID card. Then, exactly as under communism or fascism, we will be required by the authorities to "produce our papers."

My wife takes yoga classes from a man who is a pacifist Hindu from South Africa. Evidently, that's close enough to Arab Moslem terrorist for his next-door neighbor, who called Homeland Security with the news that the foreigners' house was being frequented by "Canadians."

Perhaps the real price of freedom is vulnerability. We're in the midst of a set of decisions that will make the next America, and if we make these decisions out of pure reaction and fear, America will no longer mean anything, will no longer be worth defending.

Instead, we will mutate toward a new racism and a new everyday oppression and regimentation of everybody. And even if we do that, we will not make ourselves invulnerable in this chaotic world, a world dominated by homo sapiens, a species that has always been full of violence, rage, and pain.

Indeed, while bureaucratic consolidation and surveillance make it harder to amass explosives, they also make for ever-clearer targets and ever deeper resentments.

Somewhere between Alligator Alley and t-shirt hell we had better find a balance that keeps us free.

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Crispin Sartwell writes from Railroad, PA.