Home of the Brave

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America is a great nation. This is the result of our civil liberties, our rights. Without these rights we would not be America. While the truth of how we act has not always held up to it our ideal is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now there are those who wish to change that, people in the media who are promoting fear, who would like us to believe that we cannot be secure and have our civil liberties remain as they are. They seem to want America to be the land of the secure and the home of the afraid.

Recently it’s been harder to claim we are the home of the brave. More and more people are acting afraid of things that have not happened. They are telling us that we should be afraid too. That we should not question the decisions they make. That doesn’t seem very brave to me. The whole idea of being afraid and giving up our civil liberties seems to be anti-American. JFK once said “Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill, that we will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Terrorists are very scary. There are some who want you to feel as if constant attacks against us are raising the death toll every day and clearly we must act now to save ourselves. Outside of a small minority of people the truth is that other than emotionally few of us has been directly affected.

We all know about the attacks on September 11th. The news interrupted broadcasts to show that first plane hit the tower. I was still trying to comprehend that when the reports were updated to show the second plane. Thousands were killed. It was a tragedy and we should never forget it.

If any lesson should be taken from that day it is that a fe...

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...e to protect us does not increase our overall security. You are more likely to be harmed by an improper search than a terrorist bomb. Being locked away without legal resort would affect more people than terrorists could ever hope to reach.

These rights are in place to protect us. It doesn’t make any sense to say that we need to remove some protection to become more secure. It also doesn’t make any sense to imply that there is no possible situation in which we can have both civil liberty and security. We need to be brave, to stand up to those who would harm us and say I am not afraid, to tell those who dislike our way of life that we will fight tooth and nail to keep it that way, tell them that this is the greatest country in the world because of our freedoms and that we will do whatever is necessary to keep it that way. After that we can deal with the terrorists.

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