From your favorite search engine, just enter "Niemoeller" and skim through some of the pages that come up. I’m looking for you to run into a statement by Rev. Martin Niemoeller, 1892-1984:

"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."

Now, most of us had seen one form or another of this bit of learned experience before the eleventh of September. But judging by well-meaning statements made in this day-to-day debate about "Safety Vs. Liberty," very few of us have taken it to heart. Safety and liberty are community issues and not individual ones; when his neighbor’s rooftop is ablaze, a wise man fears for his own house.

If that’s so, then collectively we are not very wise. In pre-9-11 America, someone made a rule that we are not supposed to be concerned about the liberties enjoyed by our neighbors. I don’t know who decided that, or when, because I must have been dozing. But someone handed down the law that if your neighbor’s guns are being forcibly registered, outlawed, and taken away, if you don’t own guns and you don’t hunt or shoot, you should be happy. If the marginal tax rate goes up on people who make more than $350,000 a year, then so long as you don’t make 350k a year, you should be ecstatic. Screw you, gun owners! Screw you, rich guys!

Does that sound like a healthy attitude in wartime? It doesn’t stop there. If Bayer is forced to surrender their Cipro patent, if you don’t own stock in Bayer you should be glad. If the minimum wage is hiked indiscriminately and often, then so long as you are not an employer of minimum-wage workers, you should dance with joy. Screw you, Bayer! Screw you, employers!

The rule says that if you don’t celebrate these capricious and spontaneous confiscations of other people’s rights, freedoms, privileges and properties, then at the very least you should mind your own business. Such things do not affect you, after all. And aren’t these liberties being taken away to help other people?

The sun had not yet set for the first time on the new crater in Manhattan, when pundits began to wonder aloud what liberties we would willingly sacrifice for the added safety we now would be needing. I find that obscene. It’s one thing to exchange your freedom for safety, when safety has become precious and rare; it’s quite another thing to anticipate this, at the very first sign such a debate might be started, as if salivating for the opportunity to no longer be free. That’s like getting lost in the mountains, and killing your friends to eat their flesh before you’re even hungry.

But if I was angered by this question when it was asked, I’m revolted now that we’ve found an answer. Mister Government, we have some freedoms to give away. Not mine, and not my friends’; the ones that belong to the "other" guy. Anybody who does things I’ll never do, has things I’ll never have, and knows important people whom I’ll never know - he doesn’t need freedom. Bayer doesn’t "need" their patent; hunters don’t "need" their guns.

In short, I want the government of Genghis Kahn for that other guy; I want the government of Patrick Henry for me and my friends.

Well, most of us want one thing more than anything else right now: to use our intellect and our information-gathering abilities to make ourselves and our families safer, without handing any kind of victory to the terrorists. From where I sit, Niemoeller’s most famous statement seems to show us how to do exactly that. Remember the community aspect to life, safety and liberty. Protect those "rich" guys, protect the employers, protect the gun owners - as if you are protecting yourself. Because that’s exactly what you would be doing.

Morgan K Freeberg

You can e-mail Morgan at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

About Morgan K. Freeberg

Copyright © 2001 by Morgan K. Freeberg
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-Published with permission