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Roaming the streets of downtown Philadelphia during a recent trip provided a prime example of how the events of history can simultaneously echo through the centuries while the actual meaning of our ancestors' actions are completely forgotten.
Plastered in a wide variety of store windows were numerous posters telling me that I wandered about in "The Land of the Free, The Home of the Brave." Souvenirs decorated in red-white-and-blue lined shop shelves. Light poles festooned with flags or patriotic banners snapped smartly above me. Reminders that Philadelphia was a center of activity in the creation of the United States permeated the atmosphere.
Ben Franklin lived in Philadelphia. You can see the location of his home, his outhouse (!), his grave. Statues of this elder statesman and inventor stand guard in strategic locales. Betsy Ross's reputed home is also a popular place to mark the legacy of a woman who probably did not design the first U.S. flag and who may or may not have sewn it up.
Men and women masquerading as citizens from the Eighteenth Century prowl the sidewalks. I spied "Ben Franklin" and even had a brief conversation with "George Washington." A grade school "militia" sporting wooden "guns" saluted and marched behind the Second Bank of the United States.
In the heart of the city, the government is hard at work expanding its visitors center. Bulldozers scrape the earth. Half-finished concrete pillars creep skyward. Vast expanses of barren ground mark where future buildings will rise.
Ignorance and shame abounds...
Since the attack on the World Trade Center and given various "threats" that have been issued against famous landmarks important in the American mythos, the block containing the Liberty Bell, Congress Hall, and Independence Hall is now cordoned off with metal fencing. To enter the grounds, everyone -- and I mean, everyone -- must submit to searches and metal detectors.
When my wife and I arrived to visit these American icons, I was first confronted with a prominent sign telling me that "No Weapons" were allowed into the area...including pocket knives. Given my reckless proclivity of carrying a wickedly nasty Buck penknife with a two-inch blade, I decided I was persona non grata. Adding to this evidence of the danger inherent in my person, I also carried (*gasp*) a folding scissors and a nail clipper...with a one-inch file!...on my key ring.
I was half surprised that one of the burly guards roaming the area did not immediately wrestle me to the ground and handcuff me as a threat to national security.
"Angry" hardly describes the feelings that founted through me. I had no intention of surrendering my "weapons" to a bunch of Park Service employees, never to be seen again. I also did not relish the thought of traipsing through a metal detector.
Perhaps they believed some vile visitor intended to hijack the Liberty Bell and fly it to Tahiti. Regardless, I stormed away, quite willing to take a pass on seeing firsthand a prime spot in the history of this country.
Reluctantly, I acceded to my wife's desire to return the next day sans sharp objects. Arriving early before the crowds, we were informed by a polite but large uniformed man standing at the entrance that we needed tickets. So fine. Off we went to the visitors center...to find ourselves ensnared in hundreds and hundreds of grade school students mobbing the area on field trips.
My wife braved the lines and got our two "free" tickets...for entry ninety-minutes later. To kill the time, we popped into the Bourse Building for something to drink and to avoid a shower. A wander towards the Delaware River took us by Franklin Court, through historic Elfreth's Alley with its old homes, past ol' Betsy's place, and back towards the fenced-off Liberty Bell.
The woman at the visitors center had told us to arrive ten minutes early. We added five to that...and found ourselves waiting in the heat and humidity in a line exacerbated by a significant proportion of those innumerable student groups.
Eventually, we made it to the metal detector and the guards who searched backpacks and whatever else was handy. A girl ahead of us -- perhaps all of ten years old -- was delayed while she produced a dangerous camera that had set the detector to beeping. Still setting off the alarm, she was pulled aside while a guard passed a wand a few inches from her skinny body...while any idiot could see that the metal chains fringing her blouse were the source of the illicit alarm.
When we at last made it into the inner sanctum without them confiscating my keys, pen, rubber band, or fingers, feet, teeth or hands, we were confronted with yet another line snaking towards the building housing the Liberty Bell. As we -- finally! -- approached the entrance, the Park Service employee there informed us firmly that we did not need tickets to view the Liberty Bell! The tickets were, he told us with a tone suggesting we were barely a step above bacteria in intelligence, were only for entry into Independence Hall. This "man" -- and I use that term advisedly -- kept asking us again and again if we wanted to see the Liberty Bell and that we were late for our scheduled time for Independence Hall. (After obeying the "rules" as we had been told them, we were twenty minutes beyond the 11:15 time on our tickets.) He said we could "ask" the Park Service person at Independence Hall if we could still get in there despite our enforced tardiness.
Disgusted, we went on to "see" the Liberty Bell...as best we could through the crowd. The Park Service idiot, er, employee there compounded my mounting blood pressure when he gave a bit of history of the Liberty Bell, told us about the opposing groups that frequently picketed the area promoting their causes, and topped his condescending spiel with this gem (referring to those same protesters):
"As you can see, the meaning of 'liberty' is open to many interpretations."
Here is a person who is supposed to be a guardian of the Liberty Bell but who has zero understanding of what liberty means.
Liberty is not some subjectivist concept that varies from person to person. It does not mean one thing for one group of people and something else for another. This concrete-bound State-employed moron tried to tell us -- that because people disagree on various ideas -- that what is "liberty" for me is not "liberty" for you.
But proper concepts are objective. They correspond with things in the world in a noncontradictory way. "Liberty" does not mean we all have to believe the same things. Liberty simply refers to the fact that we are free to believe and do whatever we can or want to as long as we do not force or coerce others to do or act as we want them to. Those protesters with mutually exclusive ideas demonstrated in action the very essence of liberty: peaceful interactions among citizens. That liberty applies to everyone, everywhere regardless of who or what you are or claim to be.
Escaping that purveyor of nonsense, we headed towards Independence Hall where the Second Continental Congress met, where George Washington was appointed general of the Continental Army, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted, where the design for our first flag was decided, where the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were, respectively, adopted and drafted.
Heady stuff.
When we arrived at the place to start the tour, we were relieved that very few people were there. We thought that when we explained that we were late through no fault of our own and that no crowd lingered there that we could gain access to Independence Hall.
Oh, for such Pollyanna lapses in judgment.
The Park "ranger" barely listened to us. Rude and snapping his denials, he refused to even consider the situation or the conditions that day. Flabbergasted -- though why I was surprised at the bureaucratic mindset of this cretin, I don't know -- I tore up our tickets and tossed them aside. Even at that, we could not find an escape from this inanity and insanity; no signs pointed to an exit. Finally, we asked someone else who told us whom to ask to let us out.
Never was I more glad to leave a park.
Still, our "visit" was instructive.
I learned that -- intended or not -- the folks running this menagerie are achieving some very unpleasant goals. As they filter thousands and thousands of young people through lines and metal detectors and "no weapons" signs and personal searches, these agents of the State continue the conditioning process essential in their quest to create a future population of docile citizens. Such illogical, unnecessary, and fruitless efforts as these "security" procedures establish a false standard for what is dangerous and what is not: a ten-year-old girl hardly represents any kind of viable threat.
Beyond the abysmal ignorance of those informing bored young minds of what "liberty" supposedly means, these men and women are debasing the coin of liberty as surely as the government has debased our money. Just as bit by bit, piece by piece, the State has removed gold from our economy, silver from our quarters and dimes, copper from our pennies, and nickel from our nickels, so too has it extracted more and more of our freedom. The travesty of what we endured in Philadelphia is merely one small example of countless others that are metastasizing throughout our country: in sadistic airport security checks, in concrete barriers protecting the White House, in spy cameras sprouting like annoying insects in our nation's capital and our major cities, in military tribunals, in the false idea that defendants are guilty until proven innocent, in omnipresent snooping, internal passports, and on and on.
The fencing and gating in of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell simply reflect the corralling, the breaking of the wider freedoms that are ours by right. Even while someone like director of Homeland "Security," Tom Ridge, admits that the moves towards increased spying on and restricting of Americans has been unnecessary and accomplished nothing, our "leaders" push for more and more control, more and more power as they intrude further into our personal lives, as they limit our freedom to travel, to bank, to work, to exist as sovereign human beings.
These officially sanctioned saboteurs place protection of the symbols of liberty above the reality of liberty. They worry so much over vague threats to such objects as the Liberty Bell that they actively destroy the actual freedom they have sworn to protect. They have yet to discover that there is no dichotomy between freedom and security. Indeed, the more they move to restrict us, the less safe we become.
We are constantly told that the "terrorists cannot be allowed to win," but given the dark alterations in the fabric of American society since 9-11, the terrorists have already won. We saw the first disturbing ripples of that betrayal on the day the Towers collapsed. Those waves continue to spread wider and deeper throughout our land.
If the American people do not soon awake and object to a Big Daddy who tells us what to do, who gives us our pitiful allowances, who punishes us when we are bad...
If we continue to tolerate the cowards in the Congress, in the White House, and in the Supreme Court who refuse to face freedom and who continue to wall themselves away from chimerical dangers, then America may soon have a new slogan to drape from its collective shoulders:
"Land of the Unfree, Home of the Unbrave."
