Worth the Fee to Read It

There have been no shortage of indignities heaped upon us all in the past few years, all in the name of security. The great idol of “Security”, in fact, has been used to steadily dissolve our liberties — liberties we spent centuries bringing to the forefront of Western societies. We are, I believe, at a tipping point: it won’t take much more before liberty itself disappears. Once lost, it will be hard to regain.

Saturday morning’s Daily Telegraph over in the United Kingdom leads with a story about how various airport terminals in the UK will require fingerprints (four of them) from each and every passenger entering and boarding flights. Frankly, I don’t much care what “problem” we are ostensibly solving with this sort of treatment. As Patrick Smith, author of Salon’s“Ask the Pilot” [warning: premium service] notes, flying is an annoying experience on the ground, starting with the alternating “hurry up”, “queue up” and “wait” sequences involved in dealing with the procedures around check-in, security, boarding lounges, boarding and the jetway. Adding facial image verification and the repeated application of four fingerprints simply to make it through these queues and onto the airplane will make a horrid experience even worse.

I really don’t give a care whether, as BAA says, “the biometric information will be tossed away within 24 hours and never given to police” because I don’t believe it for a second. We have spent more than a quarter-century now reciting the mantras of “cops are tops”, “only criminals need to fear”, etc.: what the police want they will get — and, when politicians are concerned, whether they want it or not, it will be forwarded regardless, “in the interests of security and early detection”. British Columbia’s Bill 73 (affectionately nicknamed the “Anti-USA Patriot Act” Law) forbids the storage — for any length of time — of any personal information about BC citizens where it could be subject to the American USA Patriot Act provisions for turning information over to police, security agencies and intelligence services. Laudable, one might think, except that for many of us — Nexus card holders, former INSpass holders, and now flyers to, from and through the UK, fingerprints, faces, etc. will be routinely available. If it is routinely available, it will be made available.

Separately, I am finding my anger rise every time I hear that phrase “police say he was known to them”. (Sometimes, it’s “well-known”, which is worse.) It seems that in just about every incident that makes the news these days the possible suspect(s) are “known to police”. What this phrase is starting to mean to me is that each and every one of us is on file. Our ability to be presumed innocent is gone: almost by definition, those “known to police” are those the general public sees as “up to something”.

So many of the “safety and security” procedures we are subjected to, of course, make us known (and make us feel as though we must have done something, to boot). Putting the fear of sudden arrest into us, of course, is part of the security state’s strategy: if everyone feels slightly guilty all the time, they will go along instead of standing up for their rights. The man who, for instance, protests the plain inefficacy and stupidity of airport security is the man who does not fly — not now, and possibly not ever again. The man who, for instance, questions why those people over there are being beaten with a billy club is not only likely to find himself in the paddy wagon, but probably sporting a lump or two as well. The man who, as happened in North Vancouver, stands on his right not to have his premises searched without a warrant finds his door broken down, himself thrown to the floor, and the search proceeding anyway while he is hauled off on charges of obstruction. So it goes, and so freedoms are lost.

In many cases, now, our laws are in direct conflict with one another: you cannot act without violating one of them. Read your province’s highway traffic or motor vehicle act carefully (often, this represents upward of 25% of all laws applicable in the jurisdiction). One must observe the posted speed limit, yet one must not obstruct traffic: in Halton, Ontario, a driver was charged with obstruction for driving at the speed limit on a road with legal passing zones by a police cruiser (not signalling with lights that there was an emergency) that was driven by an officer who wanted to go faster than the posted limit. When you can be charged with anything at any time, contempt for the law sets in.

This is the problem with the whole “law and order” motif, actually. Politicians love it: it’s a great vote getter. Media personalities love it, too: the boards light up for talk radio. Frothing at the mouth about “wrestling the problems to the ground” is easy to come by. But the rising violence in our streets is correlative to the crackdowns, thus generating even more “security apparatus”, which creates more contempt, and so on in a positive feedback loop.

A minimal set of laws; the sense of obligation to serve rather than to control: these are the tools for a polite, well-behaved society. Everything beyond that eats into liberty, public decency — and destroys a free people.

It is time to stand up and say “enough”, if we can. No special favours for groups. No law-piled-on-law. No constant monitoring. Assume a man in the street is minding his own business, as the presumption of innocence suggests.

It’s that — with all the inefficiencies involved — or the national security state. Leviathan will out if not restrained.

The science-fiction author, Robert A. Heinlein, made the point over and over again in his works that you can have freedom, or you can have security, but not both at once. His main characters, who are all exemplars of “free”, take risks: they don’t stop to tell anyone they’re going, they don’t worry about packing for all contingencies, they just go and do what they believe needs to be done. Heinlein believed that there was no security — you could anticipate certain risks and (as he put it) be somewhere else — but at the end of the day you had to size up the situation quickly, decide what to do, and just take action.

So how did we tame a continent, build a society on it, and have the dogged determination to achieve glory in one century, and become a nation of wimps in another?

Where are the Canadian captains of business deciding to build their enterprises even further? Oh, yes, they took the quick pay-off and sold out. Good heavens, our major beer companies could have had global brands, but for an unwillingness to make a commitment to their first foreign markets and actually advertise their product they gave it all up, sold themselves to global brands, and now don’t even make much of their own product for sale in Canada. Even in the resource sector we’d rather have the security of a bank account filled with the proceeds of sale. Losers for the sake of security, and in turn expecting “guaranteed investments” rather than recognizing the markets are a casino and filled with risk, along with a cut to the house.

Where are the Canadian politicians willing to stand up and be counted for anything? There isn’t any one of them truly willing to stand up for their party’s principles, or honour the expectations they engendered. We have Conservatives who don’t conserve and who extend rather than claw back the reach of government and restore the open, free society we once were. No, we get ever more government meddling in how we invest, a focus on crime and “law and order” (it polls well, you see), and more promised regulations. Of course, their fear and trepidation at actually standing for something is never tested, for they have no opponents at this game.

We have Liberals who are as illiberal as they come, not caring to defend the notion that the individual is supreme and unhyphenated that is at the core of their dogma one iota, yet there’s no problem playing pussy-foot with the rule of law (Caledonia). We have Bloc et Parti Québeçois members cheering for Kosovo — c’est nous! — and denying in the very same breath that the same principle applies to anyone not wanting to join them in creating Zimbabwe sur St-Laurent. We have New Democrats whose idea of an “ordinary Canadian” is tossed onto the front of anything and everything they want to pipe up for, rather than actually figuring out what parts of the Canadian economy most of us are actually working in these days — and let’s not mention some of the “drop everything and they’ll throw flowers on us as we leave” thinking they bring to the role of the Canadian Forces — and, well, the Greens might actually have a few things to offer that are worth hearing, but they are hard to sort out amongst the normal 120 decibels of ear-piercing shrieking about how evil everyone is.

But none — nary a one — of these politicians will take a risk. Nothing is uttered without being polled to death and focus grouped to hell and back. Every word, every camera angle, is chosen. The very notion of speaking from the heart, in an unguarded moment, is anathema to them and to their handlers. As a result, even when the outrage might be real, it always comes across as scripted and fake. Even when a question raised in the House might be answered, it won’t be, because actually treating the person across the aisle (going in either direction) as a human being engaged in a national conversation might come with the risk of having to say “I see. Thank you very much”, and that would never do.

This is how you get the collection of losers leading the various Alberta political parties oh-so-cautiously through an election that ought to be of some import, but instead makes watching soap suds form swirling patterns in a bucket of dirty water much more interesting than the future of a province which, by international standards, has done a piss-poor job of managing its bounty and turning it into a legacy for its citizens. This is how you get the illustrious John Tory — truly a legend in his own mind — and the snake-oil salesman Dalton McGuinty — who, having power and the ability to act, would rather whinge with rather less charm and sincerity than a two-year-old testing the limits of the people around him — both doing their part to destroy Ontario, and the future of Ontarians, while everyone just goes on without a care in the world other than to keep supporting this sort of nonsense. But, then, in Canada’s two major head office hubs — Calgary and Toronto (and as with Montréal in this regard) — the politicians and the business leaders are interchangeable. None of them know how to take a stand, take a risk, set an audacious goal and make us want to join in that vision.

When we’re left with the BC Government’s new carbon tax as the thing that everyone can get excited about, it shows that we’re truly running this country on fumes. It’s another too-small, too-timid move — or, if you’re not buying into Green Mania, another cash grab for no purpose [take your pick] — but it stands out, after months of preparing the way, as a sign of the truly bold initiative, when all of that reputation stems solely from the whispers having led somewhere, for once.

We allow surveillance cameras galore, half-undress at the airport, publicly support police that break our laws (on the grounds that “they’re protecting us”), answer the same “twenty questions” every time we want to deal with our bank (even when they call us), and vote, sheep-like, for the same old patterns all on the ground of being, and feeling secure. We want 15%+ returns, and no risk. (The unwinding American empire at the hands of the collateralized debt obligation slicers-and-dicers, when those debts in turn are composed of decomposing mortgages that never should have been written, ought to have been warning enough that there’s no free lunch, but still we stampede to the next “too good to be true” offer.) I could go on, but my blood pressure is high enough now…

At the end of the day, it comes down to you. You, as an individual, must decide whether you want security or freedom. You can’t have both.