Brain Fertilizer

In my own little Bonfire of the Vanities Moment, I'd like to apologize somewhat for the last post. I've been pressing on this blog, feeling I have to find some way to justify Michelle Malkin's linking of me. I wanted to show my entire range of blogging in just a few days. Now, I can often be that prolific, but I was making an effort. And since everyone was talking about the possible terrorists on the flight, I thought I'd try to put it all together and take a moment to try and guess what changes it might have on our society. In retrospect, after a few days of reflection, I don't think I did a very good job...

Ah, well. My overall point was trying to be that in the past, we gave an amazing amount of authority to elected/appointed/hired officials, but with that authority, we expect they won't abuse it, and our system of government has methods built in to allow us redress in the event that authority is abused. Somewhere along the line, though, we began to expect our law enforcement authorities would, could, and should almost automatically know who the badguys actually are, and leave the rest of us alone.

It just cannot work that way.

The underlying assumption of our system of law enforcement and crime prevention is that most people will generally try to follow the important rules, and that we won't get messed with unless we are doing something excessively bad. It's why comfortable suburban dwellers get so upset when a cop stops them for going 5 miles over the speed limit: "Why aren't you out catching criminals instead of messing with me for such a minor thing?"

This provides a loophole for terrorists to work with. If we want to make ourselves more safe from a terrorist attack, that loophole will have to close. There are two ways to close it: if we, as citizens, start getting into each other's business, or if we allow law enforcement officials more latitude to arrest/detain/hassle us before a definitive crime has been committed. Both choices are distasteful to Americans, yes. But losing 3000 citizens in one morning is far worse than merely "distasteful", and so something's gotta give. I wonder which it will be?