Wednesday, October 31, 2001
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Wednesday, October 31, 2001 |
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We musn't win the war, lose the peace By DAVE HAMRICK I'll try not to sound too much like a broken record on this subject, but it's important. What if we win the war and lose the peace? Congress has given the president all kinds of new police powers to help fight terrorism, including allowing "roving" wiretaps, secret searches, detention of immigrants without charge, etc. It is the crises that a nation faces that ultimately define it. We can trace numerous modern ills back to crises: deficit spending that started in war time and never seemed to go away; a boat load of government programs meant to pull us out of depression three quarters of a century ago most notably Social Security which also never went away. The income tax, for heavens sake, which is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, though the 16th Amendment made it technically "constitutional," was originally levied to help pay for the Civil War effort. It's been a thorn in the side of the American people and the American economy ever since. And now we're navigating a very slippery slope indeed with new laws that could eventually result in our evolution into a true police state. Wouldn't that be ironic. If we're successful, we crush several networks of terrorists and in the process dismantle the police states that support them, and we end up becoming a police state ourselves. I haven't had a chance to read the new law, but when I can get time I will. I want to know how severely it damages the balances that keep in check the power of the state over the individual. If immigrants can be detained without charges, there must be a trigger somewhere that frees them if the government truly has no case against them. Otherwise, as Sheriff Buford Pusser reminded us in "Walking Tall," "They can do the same **** thing to every one of you!" I'd like to think that once this war is over, we'll have a chance to take a deep breath and look at what we've done and perhaps undo some of it. But as we've been reminded numerous times, this is going to be a long, long war. In fact, it will never be over. We will have to fight terrorism into the foreseeable future. And we have to fight it without giving up our freedom. Otherwise, we've lost before we begin.
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