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Franklin's quote was: "Any society that would give up a little
liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose
both."
Obama's quote was: "I think it's important to understand that you
can't have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy
and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as
a society."
This led me to thinking about how we compare current leaders with
past leaders and make judgments about the intelligence, sincerity or
effectiveness of one beside the other. It is difficult to consider
any one of them without some twinge of bias, either for or against.
I wonder how much romanticism we ascribe to our heroes of the past
that adds weight to their credibility or effectiveness when compared
with someone we see each day on national television.
When we examine the context of the statements of both men, as well
as the culture in which each leader made their respective
statements, it should provide some weighted meaning to each
statement. For example, when Mr. Franklin made his statement, we read
it with a backdrop of a tyrant king of another country trying to
impose burdensome taxes and laws on the people living in the New
World. Within that context, the people might have been willing to
lose a small portion of their freedom and submit to paying the
foreign tax to the king just to keep his soldiers from riding
roughshod over the citizens of the colonies. As more taxes were
levied and more freedoms were eroded, it is not inconceivable to
believe that Mr. Franklin might have surmised that the more freedoms
the people allowed the autocratic leader to take just to secure more
time living under the duress was something that had surpassed the
benefit due to the high cost. Ultimately, when the war began, all
security was lost as well as the freedoms that had been given away
for the hope of a more lasting security.
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When Mr. Obama made his statement, we read it with a backdrop of the
revelation that one of the government's large agencies, the National
Security Agency, was spying on Americans and monitoring private
telephone conversations between private citizens. The content of the
statement seemed to echo the sentiments that Mr. Franklin had voiced
more than 240 years ago. It seemed to be implying that loss of
privacy and freedom was a small price to pay in order to provide a
certain amount of security. Security in this case, however, was not
really a threat from external sources. In fact it was a threat from
our own government to abolish a certain portion of our
constitutional rights contained in the Fourth Amendment that
provides for our right to privacy and protection from the government
seizing that privacy. The statement from Mr. Obama implies each
citizen must make the choice regarding their will to tolerate some
loss of privacy, devaluing the Constitution and the right to not be
inconvenienced.
Now, perhaps if the NSA had been subverted by an overrun of
scoundrels who had taken over and implemented a spy network that
surveyed the American citizens clandestinely, and the president found
out about it, cleaned house by firing, charging, trying and
enforcing court decisions of long sentences for those responsible,
he could have come out and rightly quoted Benjamin Franklin's
sentiments and most people would have applauded the president. But
he didn't; his only action was to tell the American people they
should be satisfied with losing a bit of privacy and accept we must
spy on Americans simply as a matter of need.
From this perspective, I wonder if the statements from the two men
are not positioned at exactly 180 degrees from each other. Mr.
Franklin was thinking of a republic form of government where the
people held the power over the sovereign kingship of a foreign
country, whereas Mr. Obama was thinking of a socialist form of
government where the government officials have the power over the
people and will make whatever choices necessary to maintain that
power to enact any provisions necessary to remain in power. For him,
the action he took and the statement he made stood at the peril of
the Constitution.
Perhaps in the past 240 years there have been significant changes to
which we Americans should begin to pay attention.
[By JIM KILLEBREW]
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