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

Whole Earth,  Winter, 2002  

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How much freedom would Americans surrender to ease their fear? All of it. Take it! We're afraid of it anyway.

It is fashionable to remark that America "lost its innocence" on September 11. This is balderdash. Our innocence is too deep and intractable for that. The thing we've really lost doesn't even deserve the name of bravery. We've lost the ability to come to grips with the simple fact that life is not a safe proposition--that life will kill us all by and by, regardless. And as a society, we've just about lost the sense that until life does kill us, there are values aside from brute longevity that can shape the way we choose to live.

The modern American attitude toward risk was captured perfectly sixteen years ago in the aftermath of the Challenger space shuttle debacle. On January 28, 1986 New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six other crew members were vaporized when Challenger exploded seventy-four seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral. The commentary leading up to the launch had been full of admiration for the death-defying heroism of "the first average American in space" and her comrades. But the national mourning period that followed the blast was characterized far less by grief than by astonishment and recrimination. Commentators and citizens alike were shocked--shocked!--to learn that the bold adventure was, in fact, unsafe. Who was responsible for this outrage? Who made the faulty O-ring? Who killed Christa?

It was as if the entire nation saw the fireball but nobody had so much as glanced at the space shuttle itself. The thing was then, and is now, a Rube Goldberg contraption of breathtaking audacity. It's an airplane clamped onto the side of a highly explosive booster rocket, as if with a rubber band. What did we think the talk of bravery had been about? The shuttle is--or should be--a visceral reminder of a time when the term "American" was likely to describe a person who crossed the Atlantic in a leaky wooden boat, then climbed into a rickety wagon and drove it west across 2,000 miles or so of hostile and unforgiving ground until he either died or found a place to drop a plow. And who did all this even though, from a safety standpoint, the whole enterprise should have been illegal.

The 1986-model American turned out to be a naif rattled to his core by the discovery that an apparatus sponsored by his government, no matter how jury-rigged its appearance or how daring its avowed purpose, might be genuinely dangerous. By 2001, we'd had another fifteen years to practice the arts of denial. The commentators and the portents all agreed that sooner or later, foreign terrorists would strike dramatically on American soil. But who could have guessed they might actually bring it off?. Something clearly must be done, and if the first suggestion is to surrender to the nearest authorities any certificates of freedom that might be required--well, we've had plenty of practice at that, too.

Safety is a fine thing, but as an obsession it rots the soul. If I should live to be ninety, and I am called upon to attest to the other nursing-home residents that my life was about something racier than guessing right on the butter vs. margarine conundrum, I will speak of that thunderstorm on Lake Superior. I'll describe the touch-and-go struggle to keep the boat pointed just enough off the wind to maintain headway, and the jackhammer pounding of a madly luffing mainsail trying to spill a 75-knot gale. I'll talk about the way we huddled in the cockpit with our eyes rigidly forward because looking aft would mean another lightning-illuminated glimpse of the dinghy we towed, risen completely out of the water and twirling like a propeller on the end of its line.