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Liberty security: how much should be sacrificed? Winning essays from The Economist/Shell competition

Few competitions are open to all citizens of the planet. Literary history, or science prizes usually go to experts with credentials that certify their authenticity and scholarship. The Economist and Shell sponsor an essay competition open to anyone anywhere, but with high-end awards ($20,000 for first prize). This year 3,500 people submitted essays on "How much liberty should be sacrificed for security?" I was asked to be one of five judges.

The Economist (www.economist.com), printing 900,000 copies in five languages, has emerged as the globalocal magazine of news and analysis. I don't always approve its political slant, but it reports more current happenings more fairly than any other mag.

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Shell, especially alter the 1995 Nigerian debacle in which the government hanged eight distinguished protestors, has made increasingly serious efforts to change its business approach. It is one of the few transnationals in which an influential minority of its staff has effectively pushed sustainability.

The competition points to new communication possibilities between the global power elite and anybody literate. Winners are printed in The Economist's The World in 2003 (4.95 [pounds sterling] at www.economistshop.com), with 330,000 readers. We thank The Economist and Shell for allowing us to print them as well.--PW

MILKSOP NATION

I LIKE THUNDERSTORMS. MY DOG DOES NOT.

I never feel so impressed by planet Earth, or so satisfied to inhabit it, as when a proper thunderstorm is in progress. I like the rumbling approach of the great cumulus cloud, the booms and flashes, the way you can actually feel the air pressure drop in the moments just before the first wallop of wind arrives. I like storms even though one tried to kill me a few years ago, late at night on a 36-foot sloop with its full mainsail still stupidly up, twenty miles from the nearest shore of Lake Superior.

No thunderstorm ever offered my dog any harm, but they terrify her just the same. She whimpers and shivers. She hides in the bathroom. She crawls into people's laps. She makes an insufferable nuisance of herself, and no reassurance can calm her. Call Roxie neurotic, but she just doesn't feel safe.

Then again, if "neurotic" refers to behavior dictated by a fear that is unreasonable by prevailing social norms, then perhaps the word no longer applies. When the TV weather people in Minnesota, where we both live, interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to issue panicky bulletins concerning a thunderstorm detected (by Dopplar radar) somewhere within 150 miles (but headed this way!), they always speak as if addressing viewers no better able than Roxie to assess the odds against being eaten by thunder or struck by lightning.

Blowing threats out of proportion is, of course, the stock trade of TV news, whether the menace in question is a summer rainstorm or the distressing stains revealed when an investigative reporter shines ultraviolet light on a freshly laundered bed sheet at an upscale hotel. But television reflects its viewers' attitudes as well as shaping them, and clearly there exists a very large audience receptive to the never-ending theme: Life is meant, ever and always, to be safe--and you're not safe!

Enter Osama bin Laden.

Twelve hours hadn't passed since the first airliner struck the World Trade Center on September 11 before the talking heads on CNN turned their attention to the subject of how much freedom Americans would be willing to give up in order to feel more secure. I evidently missed the explanation of how they came to see this as the first and most obvious question written in the flames still rising from the rubble in lower Manhattan. As suddenly as the planes that had slammed into the twin towers that morning, the issue simply materialized in the vestments of the story's anointed spin.

At the time it seemed bizarre. I had spent most of the day watching the footage of those same flames, and not once had it occurred to me that a logical response to the horror might be to sacrifice my freedom.

Sure enough, though, the newsies had it right. It was as if the USA Patriot Act signed into law by President Bush six weeks later (and denounced by the Civil Liberties Union as "based on the faulty assumption that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties") were already drafted and ready on the morning of September 11, awaiting only one final push from the lobbyists at al Qaeda.

In retrospect, it's hardly startling that the pundits--and the Congress--pounced so quickly on the idea of trading freedom for safety. Nor should it come as any surprise that the American public (80 percent of it, according to this summer's opinion polls) would so readily accept the exchange as a sensible one, even when the freedoms to be surrendered are unspecified and the explanations of why eliminating them will guarantee anyone's security are not forthcoming. The TV weather people have us pegged. What Americans demand above all from their government, from their weather--from life itself--is that they be made to feel safe.

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Liberty security: how much should be sacrificed? Winning essays from The Economist/Shell competition

Whole Earth, Winter, 2002

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