Previous

Contents

Next

If You Liked the Patriot Act, You Ought to Love Airport Body Scanners
by Doug Newman
dougnewman@juno.com

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

In the days following 9/11, when the Patriot Act was rammed through Congress, we were told time and again that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" from the greatly expanded surveillance powers that the new law extended to Uncle Sam.

Millions of Americans drank this Kool-Aid. Consider some anecdotes:

A passenger after going through security at Denver International Airport: "I am so glad they are searching us like this."

A girl in my old Bible study when warrantless wiretaps were much in the news: "They can spy on me!" (Her husband worked for the NSA.)

From an exchange on Facebook. "Take my DNA. I have not committed any crimes."

Millions sang the same song: "I trust that Bush won't abuse his power." To which I always responded: "Will you be so implicitly trusting of our next president if he/she is a Democrat?"

If you gave Bush and inch, why should you be at all surprised if Obama takes a mile? Welcome to national security utopia.

First it was your e-mails, phone calls and carry-on bags. Now it is your very physical bodies they want to inspect with digital strip-search body scanners at airports.

And don't expect it to stop there. Taser bracelets and brain scanners are the next steps.

I remember reading somewhere in George Orwell's 1984 that, even in that nightmarish dystopia, you still owned what went on in those few cubic inches inside your brain.

And don't think it will be limited to air travel. The whitey-tighty false flag in Detroit on Christmas day could very easily be repeated on, say, a light rail train in Denver or an L-Train in Chicago. And these same surveillance procedures will be extended to other forms of transportation.

Just how far down this road are you willing to go? How much of your life, privacy, dignity and self-respect are you willing to lay bare, if you will, in the name of security? Just remember that, in the last century, 180 million people perished at the hands of their own governments. This is infinitely more than died at the hands of terrorists.

(And for all of you fans of "profiling" out there, just remember that a lot of these 180 million died because they were members of races or classes that were demonized by the ruling authorities.)

And please don't tell me to "render unto Caesar". We are to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and render the rest unto God. Your body, mind and soul are not Caesar's. In the timeless words of C.S. Lewis: "He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation... is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself."

Can the events prophesied in Revelation 13 be that far behind?

If you would like to post this, please e-mail me and include this URL.

Help Support TLE by patronizing our advertisers and affiliates.
We cheerfully accept donations!