Fear Has No Place in a Free Society

Lynn Mitchell has done an excellent job bringing thoughts, remembrances, and ideas from those who lived through 9/11/01.

A little retrospection is good. It helps us get a more complete picture of what happened and, hopefully, helps us focus on the days ahead.

That said, I am getting increasingly annoyed with a public that wants to wallow in self-misery without trying to come to grips with figuring out how to solve the problem(s) and implement the solution(s) from a starting point of religious, political, and economic freedom.

When we default to closed borders, closed economies and closed minds that’s a recipe for destruction.

America has always been the ideal. It has always been exceptional. It has always been the place where the “shining city on the hill” gleams brilliantly for those seeking freedom and opportunity.

It doesn’t mean to be reckless and have a penchant for anarchy.

On 9/9/01 we really didn’t have a terrorist watch list. That day, the hijacker of Flight 93 was pulled over for doing 90 mph in a 65 mph zone. Might have been nice if he had been flagged. That said, today, there are now 2.4 million people in the terrorist watch database.

So, this begs a serious question: Is government monitoring now the new paradigm? How far should it go?

The balance between freedom and security has been the ultimate question for centuries. Franklin famously quipped that “those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

It’s an extreme view, but one worth noting when we examine a whole myriad of public policy ideas.

From race relations to immigration to foreign policy to trade to taxation to education to healthcare to transportation to security, it should be our goal to ensure opportunity for all, while exercising and balancing freedom.

For example, it’s hard for me to believe that the Republican Party I grew up with that was for free trade is now advocating policies that seem more reflective of 1930.

But if strident voices are now the norm then where are we?

Have we decided to no longer listen and seek opportunity for a better society? Is compromise completely evil? Do we consider ourselves no longer exceptional that we have to isolate ourselves from the world (or are we so exceptional that that’s our new policy)? Do we no longer have faith in one another? In our neighbor? Have we completely forgotten that knockwurst isn’t native to the US, and that we made it awesome into chili dogs?

When did we start forgetting about E Pluribus Unum?

I see and hear a whole lot of fear in our discourse, but not a lot of faith. Whether that faith be in God (and the free will He gave us), our Constitution (which gave us a free republic, if we can keep it) or ourselves (and the freedom to exercise good judgement and personal responsibility).

Faith, it seems, is no longer to be applied to our public policy decisions as much as fear. It seems we just go to our corners and call the other guys evil.

This should not be the lesson we learned from 9/11. And it’s certainly not the lesson we should gather from observing our whole history.

We’re Americans. We fear nothing.

Let’s stop being afraid. And, please, pass the mustard.

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