Originally posted on June 4, 2006.

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I came across a liberal in an unexpected place last week. While I was getting ready to deliver papers, I tossed my garbage at the university police department and started up a conversation with the dispatch person. Now, I know you might be asking when does a police dispatcher have the time to chat about national politics, but this is a university police station on a week night, during summer...so no college kisd to deal with.

I expected to be able to have a good chat, agree with him, no matter how right-wing I decided to push it, and then go off and do my papers.

Instead, when I told the man hat *I* didn't feel threatened by the Patriot Act, because I have done nothing wrong, and I don't have anything to hide, he replied that what has become law under the Patriot Act is the start of a slippery slope, and the Germans in the 1930s said the same thing to the Jews...

Not expecting to find a liberal working at the police station, I was stymied for a response. Luckily, an incoming call came in, and he had to answer the phone, so off I went on my newspapeer routes...

But I also continued to think about what the dispatcher had said, and the following occured to me:

Osama bin Laden could give a rat's butt about the rights of Americans, whether we hold them sacred or trample them under our feet. Osama bin Laden could care less about the plight of the Iraqis, the fate of the royal family in his home of Saudi Arabia, or the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza...this despite the fact that he talks about all of these alot, and undoubtedly these things make great grist for the Islamic fanatic rhetoric machine.

However, at the end of the day, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are all about establishing a radical Islamic state throughout the world, preferably without the United States in it. Now you ask "Why?" And the answer to that is because as the world's last superpower, the United States is a threat to the establishment of that radical Islamic state.

I reasoned that if Al Qaeda could have killed 3 million people on Sept. 11, 2001, they would have done so. Al Qaeda does not need a reason to want to kill Americans. The fact that someone is American is enough to seal their fate, as far as Al Qaeda is concerned.

It might be all well and good to sit here in the United States and talk about personal freedom and human rights, and moan about their loss. I have seen a lot of college students argue these points with their little college attitudes, with the sorta pious "we're college students, we're cosmopolitan, and we know what is right about the world and bad about America" style of talk. This is all well and good, but the thing about human rights and the personal freedoms we all share is that they are best when enjoyed while alive.

That's right folks, the dead don't give a damn about human rights and personal freedom. They're DEAD. And Al Qaeda wants to render Americans dead, no matter where they are. In my book, that means that personal and national security has to take a higher priority, and if that means a bit of inconvenience at the airport, if that means I need to be searched every so often, if that means that the government wants to know what I check out of a library, if that means that we have racial profiling on traffic stops, if that means that personal freedoms take a back seat for a while, by all means, DO IT!

Because in the end, the job of the government is to protect its citizens, so that they can enjoy the rights and freedoms that some of us feel strongly enough about that they hype up a conspiracy to explain why the government wants to take them away.

Myself, I have nothing to worry about. I've done nothing wrong, and I don't have anything to hide.

---
John B.
Blog Guy

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