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.

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.

For two decades and counting, we citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave have happily traded freedom for every scrap of bogus safety dangled before us. Indeed, we have devoted prodigious energy to inventing threats that demand the sacrifice of liberty, privacy, and even basic human dignity.

It hardly takes an international cabal of murderous fanatics to frighten us into making the trade. This is a country in which millions of working people submit routinely to random inspections of their own urine. Why? So that someone, somewhere, can feel falsely assured that no insurance claim is processed and no forklift in the nation is driven down a warehouse aisle by a weekend marijuana smoker. The act of contributing the sample must be observed by monitors to prevent the wondrous crime of urine fraud--a transgression unimaginable before the 1980s, when we obliged Ronald and Nancy Reagan by opening our bladders to public scrutiny in the name of workplace safety.

From the other end of the political spectrum come the pusillanimous speech codes on our college campuses. These restrict permissible discussion so that tomorrow's thought leaders may feel safe. Safe from what? From chance encounters with thoughts that might disturb their equanimity.

We know perfectly well--television tells us so--that half of humanity lives in appalling poverty and that common pastimes on three continents include fleeing marauding bandit-armies and wondering where one's next meal will come from. Yet here in America, the threat du jour--our own pet idea of a deadly menace to our health and welfare--is secondhand smoke. We're not only able but eager to take this seriously, ordinances and all. In the entire state of California there is no saloon with a clientele so reckless and depraved that the law will avert its eyes and permit them to take the insane risk of drinking a beer in a building occupied by a person who might smoke a cigarette.

Contemporary vacationers will be scandalized to learn that in Frank Sinatra's heyday, diving boards were standard equipment at the swimming pools of the glittering hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Even three-meter high boards! The curse was lifted, thanks to a well-grounded fear of personal-injury lawyers, and the Strip today is proudly board-free. After all, someone might get hurt. Against that prospect, who would argue for the freedom to attempt a back flip in the gambling capital of the world?

We'd sacrifice the right to choose what foods to put in our mouths if only the dietitians would settle long enough on which ones are the safest for the' bills to be pushed through our state legislatures. Sugar or saccharin? Margarine or butter? Wine or abstinence? Meat or no? There are germs on our kitchen counters that appear under ultraviolet light! Something we're ingesting is bound to prevent us from dragging out our worried lives for a full ninety years. Please, God, won't the food scientists tell us once and for all what it is?

Small wonder if Osama bin Laden expected the entire American edifice to collapse along with the New York towers the moment he showed us something genuinely scary. We gave him every reason to believe it would.

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.

Pleasant though many of them were, with the cheese and crackers and such, I doubt I'll have much to say about the hours I spent on Superior with the sails furled, motoring in perfect safety through flat water and dead air.

Jack Gordon is a freelance writer and editor living in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie. He has worked as a radio and newspaper reporter, and as chief editor of business/trade publications, including Training magazine.

UBUNTU: CAUGHT UP IN THE BUNDLE OF LIFE

LIFE WALKS THE MAIN street of Phuthaditjhaba on a Sunday morning. Up and down green and orange hills to the horizon, the people of the town make their way to church in the bright sun. Lines of young African girls in white dresses and white caps, draped with blue and red sashes; solid, round-bottomed ladies in floral pleated skirts and matching hats shaded by umbrellas; an old couple carrying water for the journey, the woman bent and draped in dark shawls. Between them swaggers a tall, young African in black stovepipe trousers, his hat tipped over one eye. There are no cars, except for the occasional cherry-red minibus picking up those who will pay.

"I don't approve," frowns the Judge, setting down his sherry. "I would be very concerned for your security." In Australia, amidst the polished mahogany and deep red carpets of the United Services Club, I have just told my mentor that I am moving to South Africa at the end of the year. He is an intelligent man, not given to knee-jerk reactions, and his concern for my security is not without foundation. The statistics support him. I am moving from a country which in 1999 recorded a murder rate of 1.8 per 100,000 residents to a country which in the same year recorded a murder rate of 55 per 100,000. In 1999, 119 of every 100,000 residents of South Africa were victims of rape or attempted rape.

A senior Melbourne barrister tells me that it would be `thoroughly irresponsible' to consider raising children in such a dangerous country. His vehemence prompts me to do some research. In the course of looking up South African crime statistics, I come across some other figures. In 1999, the murder rate in Washington, DC was 56.9 per 100,000 residents. In the same year, 147.3 of every 100,000 residents of Minneapolis were victims of rape or attempted rape. I know that statistical comparisons are dangerous, but surely a move to either of these cities would warrant at least some of the comment my move to South Africa has attracted. Yet I have not heard anything to compare to the concern which a move to South Africa evokes. Is this disparity the handiwork of that breed of South African expatriates who so enthusiastically denigrate their country to all who have ears to hear? Or is it that we simply have greater fear of people with whom we have no connection or understanding?

In an uncharacteristic bout of taxi chattiness, I poured out my plans to a fatherly Belgian cab driver on the way home in Melbourne one night. At my gate, he turned off the meter, turned on the light and faced me over his seat, his thin line of moustache straight and serious. "I do not want to pour water on your dreams, but I must give you a warning. You must think very carefully before you take this step. You are young and you think everyone has a good heart. But these people, they are not like us. Taking a life means nothing to them. He leaned into the light and repeated, in his precise, careful accent, pausing between each word, "They ... are ... not ... like ... us."

Who are `they' in South Africa's chequered history? Are they the Afrikaner forces of Vlakplaas who tortured and `barbecued' their African victims during Apartheid? Are they the Africans who burned to death fellow Africans by `necklacing' them with burning tyres? Or are they the English generals who forced thousands of African and Afrikaner women and children into the squalid concentration camps of the Boer War where they died of typhoid and starvation?

We must assume that the taxi driver drew the `us and them' distinction on the basis of skin colour for he went on to give as an example the mob that burned an Australian missionary and his sons to death as they slept in their car one night in 1999. That crime was perpetrated by a mob in the remote village of Manoharpur in Orissa, India, not renowned for its South African population. But in the taxi driver's mind they constituted the very same threat--the `other.'

The taxi driver is not alone. As the world grows smaller, the other comes nearer. We now steel ourselves to push illegal `boat people' back out to sea; to swipe ourselves in and out of office buildings with magnetic security tags; to filter and sanitise our visitors more thoroughly than ever. I do not deny that there are genuine and growing threats to our security, but before we begin the process of embalming our lives, preserved from danger and experience, may we peer out from behind the lager for a moment and ham a little about some of those we fear?

In reading about South Africa, there is a word I come across constantly: ubuntu. Ubuntu (in the Nguni languages) or botho (in Sotho languages) serves as a spiritual foundation of African societies. It is a worldview reflected in the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which means "a person is a person through other people." Other translations elaborate: "To be human is to affirm one's humanity by recognising the humanity of others in its infinite variety of content and form" or "A human being is a human being through the otherness of other human beings."

Ubuntu, as explained by its most famous exponent, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, means that a person is human in being enveloped in the community of other human beings, "caught up in the bundle of life." It promotes compassion, hospitality and forgiveness. It is a philosophy which is not difficult to recognise in the life of Tutu. But one might well ask where lies the compassion in the carjackings which plague Johannesburg every day or the violent clashes on the Cape Flats? Where is the humanity in the murder of a 78-year-old woman on her farm in the North-West Province? These are the questions the skeptics ask, but they overlook a much greater question. Why has this country not seen more violence?

In 1994, South Africa began its transition from a racist, totalitarian state with a history of state-sponsored violence to a multi-party democracy. In 1994, the African majority in South Africa, humiliated and oppressed, tortured and murdered under the Apartheid regime, took power for the first time since Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape in 1652. White South Africa expected bloodshed.

It is hard to imagine that here, sitting on a smart hotel balcony on a hill above Johannesburg as Dali Thambo (son of Mandela's fellow-prisoner, Oliver Thambo) wafts past in a bright yellow kaftan. Johan has interrupted his negotiations with the Reserve Bank to take us to lunch. "People are always complaining," he says, staring out over the forest of Johannesburg with his cool, blue eyes. "They complain about crime. They complain about the exchange rate. In 1994, people were preparing for civil war. They were building bunkers for the war. But it never came. Now we're complaining about exchange rates. We couldn't have dreamed it would be this good."

What happened to the vengeance? Where was the apocalyptic retribution? This is the real question for the world to ask of South Africa. Some say that the African majority could not organise a civil war. "These people don't even know how to hate sufficiently," said one farmer in the Free State. Rwanda and Yugoslavia tell us that it does not take a great deal of skill to arrange a bloodbath. So why did South Africa not follow suit? The general restraint shown by the African majority since 1994 perhaps speaks of a respect for life which Africans cannot have learnt from their Apartheid rulers; a recognition of our common humanity.

In 1996, Cynthia Ngewu told the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission how her son was shot dead by the South African police. He had twenty-five bullets in his body. Ngewu told the Commission how she saw the dead body of her son, Christopher Piet, on the evening news, being dragged by a rope tied around his waist. She said:

   This thing called reconciliation ... if I am understanding
   it correctly ... if it means this perpetrator, this man who
   has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human
   again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our
   humanity back ... then I agree, then I support it all.

Cynthia Ngewu makes me quiet. In Ngewu's mind, her humanity and the humanity of the man who killed her son are one and the same. She is human through the otherness of others. The alternative is separateness: high walls, carefully chosen holiday destinations and security passes; a long and sterile life. How much freedom should we trade for our security? I suggest we turn the exchange on its head. When I move to South Africa, I will exchange some of my security to become part of a country where a woman who has lost her child may speak as Ngewu does, where freedom is other people, where one is every day caught up in the imperfect, heart-stopping, striving bundle of life. I am neither brave nor foolish. I simply believe the exchange rate is excellent.

As the sun sets on Phuthaditjhaba, a small boy runs up the hill by the side of the road. He is wearing shorts so big he has pulled them up to his shoulders, an arm down each trouser leg. From the valley comes a drumbeat of hooves as a tall horse gallops through the dusk shadows, bare but for a slim, young boy. The boy waves one hand above his head and yells as he flies past a group of stern-faced mothers with babies tied to their back, and a pick-up overflowing with local men and children. The taxi driver was right.

They are not like us.

Katharine Kemp is a lawyer with a commercial practice in Melbourne, Australia. She was junior counsel in the controversial MV Tampa Asylum Seekers Case in the Federal Court of Australia in 2001, and has also worked for the Red Cross Refugee Settlement Service. Katharine graduated with degrees in law and commerce from the University of Queensland, Australia. She was ranked one of the top eight women at the 1997 World Universities Debating Championships in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where she met her husband, South African lawyer Marc Kemp. In January they will move to Cape Town, where Katharine plans to work in public interest law.

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