Letter From An American Expat About The TSA And The "Security" State
From TSA News Blog. The letter, from Alexa Chiang, is to Wendy Thompson, co-founder of Freedom to Travel USA (FTTUSA), whose personal story is here. Chiang writes:

Hi Wendy,

Just want to send you a note to say, thank you for all your efforts and commitment.

I feel like the government we have now is so scary. It's not that the Obama Administration is scary, or the Bush Administration is scary, per se (although I think all the people working in so-called "security" are out of their minds and f#$@king mad!). My biggest fear is that they now have set up such a vast system in place to infringe on each individual's privacy so extensively that, if just one administration, be it the current one or future one, decides to abuse it and suppress people, they can. They can do so easily. Our freedom hangs in the balance, and so many people don't see it.

People assume that this cannot happen in America. Why they are so trusting, I do not know. I guess people think I'm paranoid, or a conspiracy theorist. Whatever. We've seen this happen in history before.

. . . I'm continually shocked and disappointed at how our current society, people refuse to accept any level of risk of danger in life. People want to live in a risk-free society with zero tolerance for the fact of life that sometimes, shit just happens. And it's a good trade-off to maintain our freedom. We live in the safest time in history, at least those of us living in civilized world, and we let all sorts of fearmongering get to our heads.

Again, thanks for all your work!

Alexa Chiang

Re-read that last paragraph: We live in the safest time in history.

I've said this many times -- like in the op-ed I wrote about the TSA -- that trying to live in a "risk-free" society comes at too high a price:

Our founding fathers were a bunch of obnoxious jerks - and I mean that in the most reverent way. They were fiercely opposed to blind obedience to authority and risked their lives to flip it the bird. Oh, how disappointingly - and dangerously - far we've fallen. Our constitutional rights are increasingly being eroded, and so many Americans are just standing around blinking like livestock.

...We cannot ensure our complete physical safety - not even by throwing away all of our civil liberties. Trading our rights for security (or, in this case, "security") is exceptionally dangerous. Every time we go all "We The Sheeple ...," every time we allow one more civil liberty to be yanked from us, it's that much easier to take the next and the next, until we wake up one day wondering how we ended up living in a police state. Better that we do our sobbing now than then.