The Hum of All Fears

I usually wait for blockbuster movies to make it to WTBS or TNT, since the profanity is bleeped by then. As for Ben Affleck's new pic, I'm going to read the book.

Claudia Rosett makes a good point that the concern that this film will scare people seems kind of pointless when we live in a situation that should scare them witless.

The major fear I've been reading about is the fear of civil libertarians that the FBI might investigate innocent people. Nobody even asks the obvious question, "What's wrong with that?" It's not the Federal Bureau of Protecting our Delicate Sensibilities, you know.

Shortly after 9/11, I heard a woman describing her participation in a civil rights rally over the fear that the terrorist attacks would lead to a loss of our privileges and civil liberties. She noticed a car with two men in it parked nearby and felt the cold clutch of her rights being "chilled." I wondered why she didn't think about how nice it would be to have a few pigs, er, cops around if a bunch of terrorists showed up.

Investigations are not violations of rights. They can clear us of false accusations, but no one seems to think of that any more. The current panic about removing the absolutely idiotic restrictions on the activities of agents reminds me of kids in the back seat yelling, "He's LOOKING at me!" At some point, we need to tell the ACLU and the rest to grow up and quit whining.
No harm is done by someone checking you out. We spend a lot of money, time and effort trying to get others to look at us, but when it turns out that the FBI might have cast its gaze our way, we freak.

The thing that made past abuses abusive was that they were motivated by considerations other than protecting America and solving crimes. Remember Reagan's fondness for the phrase "Trust, but verify"? It's a good saying, and we should start chanting it. We establish police departments for a good reason, and if we catch their officers misusing their authority, they should be out on their ears, even prosecuted criminally, but that doesn't me we have to disable them to prevent them from doing something bad. Doing that is like buying a gun for self-protection, then filing off the firing pin so that it won't hurt someone by accident.

At some point, we have to realize that we have much more to fear than an intrusion on our privacy. In one of the versions of Chicken Little, she gets eaten by a fox who takes advantage of the fact that she is so focused on the sky falling, that she doesn't notice his machinations. If we can't trust the people we hire to protect us, or the institutional safeguards against overreaching and corruption, then we might as well just sit down and wait for the terrorists to come after us.