A vast majority of the responses to this blog addressed the issue of national security imposing itself on civil liberties. This is a natural response. It is a trained response. It is what we have all been taught to ask, because that is how the system works. A security measure is proposed, some men in suits weigh it's imposition on civil liberties and pass it or don't on whether the loss of liberties seem worse it. But there is another factor falling under the radar...
or maybe rather flying over it...
Rather infrequently do policy makers ever make too much of a stink over whether the safety measures will actually ensure anyone's safety. They assume that if it's in the effort of safety, then it will, in fact, save lives. The truth is we are allocating our funds and resources to the wrong places. We need to draw our eyes away from the easy-to-object-to impositions on civil liberties, and turn them to the statistics. Terrorist attacks on American citizens have killed approximately less than 3000 people in the last 15 years, though some numbers are variable. That's about 200 people a year. Flu deaths (not even bird or swine... just flu) are estimated to kill 30,000 to 40,000 in a good year. Even if 3000 was a low number, that is still a DRAMATIC yet largely ignored gap. And the leading cause of death in the U.S. according to the CDC was Heart Disease in 2002, killing 576,301 citizens, as opposed to 9/11's 2,749 casualties. Instead of fueling things like data mining with millions of dollars, we could be subsidizing more vaccines or research into medicine. But terrorism is dramatic and receives a lot of media (just as the terrorists want it to) and thus it gets a disproportionate amount of attention.I'm not saying that terrorism isn't a threat, but that we need to prioritize our threats, and take security actions based on how well they will ACTUALLY SECURE US, not just based on how much they infringe on our individual rights.
Although you do make a valid point that medical research is in dire need of funding, it can not be considered a matter of national security. Going down that path is a slippery slope and it becomes too easy to lose sight of where to draw the line of what is national security. Last year there were 30,000 fatal car accidents. Are those a matter of national security? Or for another example, smoking "kills" 400,000 people a year. But making it a matter of national security treads dangerously close to violating the basic free market rights that this country was founded on.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that the path is a slippery one, I believe it's a path we must take. Medical funding, or rather the problems it could solve, should be considered issues of security. That said, aren't we on a slippery slope now? Aren't the lines between safety and big brother being blurred (can you say Patriot Act)? We have a new system, and a young system, and in a lot of ways we're still in our "Free Trial" period as a country; There will be slippery slopes. However with a little logic I think the general consensus to the issues we raise would be based on numbers. 30,000 people die in fatal car accidents, 30,000+ people die of the flu... And yet we have D.A.R.E. programs in schools, Students Against Drunk Driving on campus, mock car crashes before proms all over the country and... What? Stickers telling you to wash your hands if you're a food service employee? Until recently (past 2 years) flu shots were both unpopular and unadvertised. Much the same will appear at a comparison of smoking to heart disease. 400,000 to 576,301 and yet the general attitude towards smokers has shifted. Gone are the days of smoking in restaurants or buildings. Obviously there is funding to non-smoking efforts, as demonstrated by the nicotine patch and gum and those programs to quit run by AU that are advertised in the bathrooms. Whereas heart disease, or rather the things that eventually cause it, are advertised by main stream media and accepted by our culture. In America, it is wildly okay to be fat. And not just fat. Obese. We will tell you it's what's inside that counts, we will tell you to love the skin your in, but we will never tell you in public or outside a doctors office that it's a health issue or that you're killing yourself.
ReplyDeleteMy point here is this: What you neglect to realize is that the points you brought up, mocking their possible positions of national security, are already being addressed, at least as matters of personal security. If we're already on the slippery slope, we may as well strap on some snow boots and stumble onward.