Stand up and be counted

by Myron Cherry

For those of us engaged in a small business, or in other business pursuits, we often don’t have the time to think about how we fit in to society. These are tense times and technology has made us world citizens whether we like it or not.

We can clearly see how we are affected by events in places that we never heard of before that have serious impacts on our lives as citizens in our own country. In this political year, we were asked to tighten our security precautions. This inevitably affects our individual liberty rights which we have fought so hard to maintain as a democracy.

Has it always been this way?

The tension between security and freedom has been with us for quite some time. In 1798, shortly after we broke away from England and declared our independence, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act. While the Act was allegedly in response to the questioned action of the French Revolutionary government on the high seas, it was also political in nature, designed by the Federalist Party and President John Adams to destroy Tomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. The Act empowered the president to arrest and deport aliens considered dangerous and also made it illegal to make public, negative statements about the government. Speaking ill about our government was a crime! Jefferson and Madison fought against the Act, claiming it was unconstitutional. A few decades later, a civil war was fought over the issue of slavery and wrenched the country to its very foundation.

Once again there was a tug between security and freedom. For a while, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus which essentially meant that people could be arrested without the ability to challenge why they were being held. Yet, President Lincoln is credited with saving our Union because he fought for freedom for all Americans and the preservation of the ideal of the common bond which makes our country a symbol and example.

Through the years we have not always lived up to this ideal and in retrospect we regret how we handled the interment of Japanese during World War II. Later, with the threat of the Soviet Union, we succumbed in America to the McCarthy era where anyone branded a Communist was subjected to deprivations of freedom, including the ability to make a living. Do you remember?

Who are we Americans?

It is often said that we are immigrants and it is true: we are French, Italian, British, Russian, Asian, African, Iranian, Arabian and so on. We practice every religion known to man. at is why since the beginning of our society we have defined ourselves not by what group we belong to, but by an ideal – an ideal which only works if we protect those who don’t always seem to fit in. We do this almost exclusively by having a system of laws and courts of justice (a tradition traced to Noah) to protect views that at any moment may seem different from what we believe in. America has always been a country that preserves the ideal to be different.

Our differences allow us to remember our individual heritages and practice our own religions. Even in the marketplace we are allowed to create new and strange entrepreneurial ideas that may seem to be a little off the mark, but with hard work it results in people achieving the American dream. Yet it is still true, as Thomas Jefferson once said--whenever we fear for our security, freedom becomes the first casualty.

And once again today we are experiencing the same call to erode our civil liberties in order to preserve our security. It is even said that to oppose this is unpatriotic. Sound familiar? If we are so secure that we have lost the ability to be different or to be free, are we really preserving our American heritage? Recently congress passed, and the president signed, a bill that allows the president to determine who is an enemy combatant to avoid the Geneva Convention requiring international standards for prisoners, to lift the right of habeas corpus, to allow secret evidence and to limit or take away the right to judicial review of convictions. Shades of 1798! The president and congress justify these laws to preserve our security and we might all agree with that since, after all, we all want to be safe. In the midst of all of this turmoil, we are not American if we don’t preserve the very reasons why this country was formed. What is the right balance?

As this difficult tension between security and freedom is played out, think about the words of Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister born in 1892. I personally posted his famous quote in a hallway where our kids would see it every day as they were growing up. Niemoeller wrote after World War II:

"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."