January 5, 2010

Bureaucracy or Freedom

I'm a little disturbed that the official reaction to the latest attempted terrorist attack was to increase the bureaucracy. This is the same bureaucracy that didn't stop the attack in the first place. We were all told that everyone had to stand in lines for hours and endure countless small humiliations and loss of control nigh unto a prison, because that would keep us safe from the next attack. We put our liquid in bags, we took off shoes, and we searched elderly women because we were told that was the only fair way to stop another attack.

Thinking back on it now, what it was really telling us is that our government considers us all suspects.

Now, it looks like the probable result is not going to be a rethinking of our strategies, but instead increasing procedures, regulations, and bureaucracies. Probably some of this will be intended to improve interagency communication and to fix the flaws this latest attack has demonstrated in the list system, goals to which I am not opposed. However, it is worth noting that the lists themselves were clearly designed to be one of the foremost interagency communication and information-sharing mechanisms, and they failed while working exactly (or nearly so) according to procedure.

We do not have stupid people running our government (with the change in administration, we're allowed to admit that again,) so how is it that the massive reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security, and the good intentions of many thousands of people, have been thwarted? Probably there are many successes we have never heard of, but this latest attack suggests that bureaucracy is fundamentally unsuited to this job.

Instead, what we found most effective at preventing this latest attack was the actions of common people, acting to save their own lives and the lives of others. The passengers who jumped the terrorist had no employment, no sensitivity training, no lobbyists, no Congressional oversight (or as is more common nowadays, Congressional blame games,) and those passengers had no lawyers drafting complex procedures for another administration to rewrite. When the attacker lit himself on fire, these passengers discovered that talking heads from either side of the aisle couldn't help them, that their personal goodwill and desire to live in peace would not save them from the assailant's hate. The passengers therefore exercised their freedom, and defended themselves and others.

I hope that as we take upon ourselves the necessary work of learning from this attack and guarding ourselves against future threats, that we remember that the government is under the control of the citizens, for the purpose of defending the freedom of the citizens.