Freedoms Walk. Narrower But Better Than Seeing It Blown Up
Today Americans, who hope to stand for freedom to an expectant world, enjoy it along a narrower walk than ever. In fact, sometimes it seems as if we have to scrunch our shoulders together to keep going and at times turn to the side to slip on by.
Why have the guardrails encroached with such uncomfortable persistence? Primarily, but not exclusively, because of the new privileges the government has assumed in order to conduct the ever-looming war on terror.
But there are a host of other incursions, such as electronic surveillance via such things as the information that goes into our credit reports and the overly numerous troopers raising money for municipalities by passing out tickets so frequently they make every driver a paranoid wreck.
But just when you feel that you ought to get as feisty as the ACLU about even the slightest encroachment on our precious freedoms, you read about the FBI stopping the al-Qaeda plan to blow up the PATH tunnel between Manhattan and Hoboken and that the information that tipped the Feds off was gleaned from surveillance of email messages.
Then, unless you...