Our society is being overrun by fear. Maybe we are right to be afraid. Five years ago, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City. Last week, a 15-year-old student walked into Weston High School in Cazenovia, Wis. and shot his principal. Twelve days ago, a deranged maniac executed five Amish schoolgirls in Lancaster County, Pa.
Last summer, a British tourist had his throat slashed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for no apparent reason. In our own affluent city of Madison, people are being assaulted on downtown streets.
What can be done about this? How can we defend ourselves when violence may spring on us at random from any dark corner?
I am not going to pretend that these questions can be answered fully in the space of this little column. Books have been and will be written bemoaning the culture of violence that plagues our country.
Experts will wring their hands about detecting emotional problems in teenagers before these teenagers turn violent. They will lament the tendency among urban youths to believe that they have no future and nothing to live for. They will try fervently to understand what makes a person a suicide bomber, giving his or her life just to kill civilians.
These are important questions that deserve to be explored to the deepest extent. That is why, as a person writing with limited space to readers with limited time and attention, I am not going to focus on those questions.
Instead, I will give you what the politicians are giving you: simple, easy answers. Al-Qaeda terrorists? They hate our way of life. Students bringing guns to school? Let the teachers pack heat too. Random murders? Give those nutjobs the death penalty; that'll teach ‘em. Sexual assaults in Madison? Those girls shouldn't have been wearing short skirts.
It is easy to see why glib answers to social ills are attractive. They address citizens' fear, and they satisfy politicians' need to appear to be decisively doing something, anything. The trouble is, they may treat one temporary symptom, but they do not solve the larger societal disease.
Here is one cure-all: Let's turn the United States into a police state. Institute the death penalty for all crimes. Put cops or military troops on every street corner. Torture every terror suspect until he or she tells us what we want to know. Remove all checks on government power.
It has been done before. A friend of mine who grew up in communist Yugoslavia said crime was never a concern because if you so much as stole a candy bar from a store, the police could take you into a secret room, beat you up and imprison you for as long as they wanted.
Every country that has transitioned from dictatorship to democracy has seen an upsurge in crime.
So yes, we could give up our freedoms, and we could indeed gain total security.
But at what cost? Are we willing to turn every school in the country into a virtual prison with metal detectors, lockdowns, zero-tolerance policies and teachers with guns? Are we willing to convict innocent people as long as we get some guilty ones too? Are we willing to give up the moral high ground and endorse torture as a legitimate means of keeping the nation safe?
Call me soft if you will, but if the price of safety is to turn our backs on ""liberty and justice for all,"" that price is too high. I would rather be unsafe in a free society than safe in an oppressive police state.
This is not to say that we should do nothing. On the contrary, there needs to be a vocal, intense and lengthy debate in this country about how to prevent violence, and the answer cannot involve causing more violence.
Indeed, a large part of this debate should involve the example set by a government which invaded another state under false pretenses, tortured prisoners, detained innocent people incommunicado and continually fights efforts to regulate who can gain possession of firearms.
But most of all, we cannot let fear drive us to give up our freedom. Every time liberty is eroded because of fear, the liberty dies while the fear lives on to conquer other liberties.
In Benjamin Franklin's words of almost 250 years ago, ""Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.""
