Awakening

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence
--Don Henley

Standing in my living room eight years ago today and watching the Towers falling over and over again, I struggled to process what seemed then (and now) largely incomprehensible. One of the few coherent thoughts that I could muster was this:

If we wanted to be safer in the future, we would have to give up freedom to do so. There is a tradeoff between liberty and security.

While that relationship may seem 'obvious' to many, it wasn't for me until the events of that fateful day permitted me to see it.

Since then, the notion of liberty and its cost have been at the forefront of my thoughts. Daily, it seems to me, we in America are indeed foregoing freedom in efforts to become more secure. For the first few years after the attack, the emphasis was on military security. Over the past year or two, the focus has been on economic security. And now, the debate is over health-related security.

In each of these situations, we must ante up more freedom to pay for this security.

More than 200 yrs ago, we were willing to die for freedom. Today, we seem willing to kill freedom in order to be safe and secure.

This country's Founders would likely advise us that we're making an unwise trade. My sense is that those thousands who perished eight years ago would concur.