Freedom and Security

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

I agree, we have. We can have both but it requires a significant change with huge benefits. Please read Invisible Hand to see what we need to do.

Franklin was a wise man, but he never faced a nuclear threat nor a 9/11. Still, I agree, freedom is ill served by surrendering liberty.

Franklin faced Native American threats, English threats and threats from other colonists who did not believe as he did. Liberty is what the founders fought for. Liberty is what many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for. To deliver up our liberty is to deny our Constitution and disrespect all of those souls who have sacrificed their very lives to protect and defend our right to freedom.

Neither of these subject exist in America.
Sorry!

I think our world is a different place than Franklin's world was. I think Franklin was a grreat man who helped craft a great land. He could not envision a world of nuclear threats, a world of bioterror threats, and a world where human beings value theirs and others lives so little that they would crash huge planes full of people into buildings just to further their cause and because they hate the American way of life. Not because you or I had done anything to them, but because of an idealogy. So, if that means that I must give up a little of my freedoms and inconvenience myself at the airport and at stadiums and not be allowed to go certain places and take pictures of certain things, then so be it. I would rather be safer and alive to spend more time with my family than be sorry and dead and have my family crying over my dead body and having people blaming each other as to why it had to happen.

We are caught in a delimma. Andrea and Lyn are correct as are the rest. Our problem (as I see it) is that we extend our liberty to everyone on the planet. Franklyn did not face an enemy who was willing to give his life to kill us. We know who our enemies are. If we closed our borders to all threats and expelled those who meet the profile, we would be safe. We don't do that because it would infringe on the rights of immigrants and visitors who really couldn't care less about our well being. Instead we choose (or let our genious governing elite choose) to give up our personal freedom.

Look around we have doing that for years to make trial lawyers wealthy.

Rest easy

Franklin certainly was faced with enemies willing to give their lives. How silly to think British soldiers did not die. Death is death.

Of course Franklin faced an enemy who would give his life to kill us! And when we give away our liberties, we act from fear. There is no worse enemy to life than fear. I agee completely with Franklin's statement.

I agree with Franklin and Selene.

I was shocked and frightened by the speed with which the Patriot Act was passed. I am grateful to the House of Representatives for putting a time limit on it, but hasn't that limit expired?
I agree with Bill W. The British believed that they could quell the uprising in a matter of days or weeks. Yes, British soldiers died in battle, but there is no record of suicide bombers or fanatic soldiers with a death wish. Read Kenneth Davis' "America's Hidden History" for more accurate information.
It would be interesting to know what Franklin would say about our current situation.

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither




Benjamin Franklin


I guess you could say that about the welfare recipients as well. Social programs geared to keep people downtrodden and beholden to the government is pretty much the same thing in my opinion.

During WW2 we gave up a bunch of our "freedoms" for security reasons. After the war, those freedoms were completely reinstated.

We are fighting an insideous guerilla (sp?) war now. Vietnam warmed us up to guerilla warfare. But the wars now have much better weapons. Guerilla warfare is the deadliest form of war, using just man and small tools of war, against man. You can hardly beat an enemy you can't find, even as you walk past him or her, on the street.

Giving up liberty for freedom.... a very valid question. This could be debated for a long time, with many pro's and con's to the giving up of freedom's temporarily.

No matter how one looks at losing a bit of freedom.... it's still a delicate balance. The freedom's MUST be restored if the war is won... no doubts there.

But then... I'm just me, no expert on politics or policies.

thanks

More all the time.

(The other) Dale C is sadly mistaken if he thinks our Liberty was Restored after WWII.
The cold war began. People were hunted and labled Unpatriotic because of their supposed Communist affiliations, even if they consisted merely of supporting socialism 25 years earlier. Witch hunts and propaganda abounded. In this country we are supposed to be free to speak our mind. Unfortunately this is not true. Being Politically incorrect these days can be deadly.

Thanks for sharing Lyn.

thanks

I'm late.

The wisest man in all of history said, "There is nothing new under the sun."

The "death wish" spoken of by Jan S has been around all along. It's called separation.

Us vs Them. War is war, no matter what the weapons. Love is love, and we need more of that than anything else, because without it there is no freedom.

The opposite of war is not peace, but love.

This is very thought provoking......
I feel that we Americans lost our freedom a long time ago and don't feel very secure at all. As a matter of fact, I haven't felt secure here since I was a very young woman.
I think that we've lost both actually...freedom and security.
I have a 13 year old niece that was 6 when 911 happened and continually asks if terrorists are going to come and bomb her house or take her out of her bed/home at night. I keep reassuring her that that is not going to happen just to ease her young, worried mind. Actually no one I know feels very free or safe here anymore.
Now, I ask you......is that any kind of freedom or security?

An interesting discussion. Bill, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried, but everyone is entitled to his opinion (at least so far, we'll see what the Bush administration comes up with next). I use the Franklin quote quite often these days. Here are men who were about to make themselves traitors to the Crown, living in a hostile environment with none of the modern technology we enjoy, yet they knew right from wrong and found a way to send their blessings of liberty forward to their descendants. One of our only jobs is to safe guard those freedoms for future generations, and so far, we've failed miserably. We need to return to the core values of respect, liberty, fraternity, equality for all citizens before we try to convert the entire world to our form of government. We lead best by example. I hate to think what example we provide for others right now.

Do blankets contaminated with smallpox count as biological weapons?
Now I am pretty certain Franklin wasn't alive when this happened, but we as a country have committed genocide torture, whooped and hollared into peaceful camps and murdered women and children, incited revolution in countries not our own, bombed villages, and we are quite well stocked with weapons of mass destruction. War is war. Torture is torture, and Love is what we need.

we extend our liberty to everyone on the planet.

Whether they want it or not, right?

I personally don't like all of our freedoms being taken one by one. It doesn't help to get security, especially since, there is truly no such thing. You can never be one hundred percent secure. There will always be a threat. You could get hit by a car, drown in the tub, choke, etc.
I just hope that one day, we the people will take our country back again.

It might be tempting to accept the "Well, Franklin never faced this or that threat" argument if not for the rampant abuses by our government against us that have come to light. The Patriot Act gave sectors of our government our trust that they would use it to protect us, yet hundreds -- not a few, but HUNDREDS -- of cases have come to light in which FBI agents and INS staffers used their new Patriot Act capabilities to snoop on citizens often just because they wanted to -- former bosses, celebrities, old girlfriends, neighbors, and such. Not to mention Bush's own contempt for FISA or any other protective rules that inhibit his reign of error.

Besides, I would feel a lot safer if the billions of dollars thrown away in Iraq by this incompetent administration had been used to actually track down and capture the man behind the 9/11 attacks. The mere symbolism of that would have quelled much of the fight against us AND be seen as just across cultures. Instead, Idiot Boy took his eye off the target in order to invade Iraq illegally and illogically, so he managed to make us less secure by showing the world that you CAN blow up an American city and get away with it.

No, if anything, today's circumstances prove that Franklin was correct not just for his time, but for all time.

Thanks for the great comments. I believe Franklins comments to be timeless as well. Our rights have been consistently abridged. The founding Fathers were considered radicals in their time, and yet they carved out a not perfect but unprecedented foundation on which we have the Right to secure our freedoms. To chip away at the very strength of our Union is to lose it and all the ideals of our predecessors. All lives given for freedom would be in vain.

I am with Selene and Jan on this one!