Eternal Vigilance

The RedRoom Blog contest for the week has me brainstorming about the concept of freedom. So I'm free(dom) associating and doing my best Toby Keith impersonation. Minus the jingoism and xenophobia.

Freedom is...

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. ...taken for granted. I recall with clarity the day I learned this fact: the police cracking batons against the door, the screaming as they flung it open, and the hostel keeper telling us to get out of our beds and pull our luggage into the floor.

I was in Edinborough, Scotland, sleeping in a hostel with 50 or so of my closest friends in closely arranged double metal bunk beds with naked mattresses. My eyes burned when the police flipped on the florescent lights and roused everyone. It was 4:00 AM.

I was on a week's vacation from the school where I was studying in London, and though my friends and I arrived early in the evening, we decided (with practicality typical of 20 year-olds) that rooms would be easy to come by, so a better way to spend the dying twilight was to hang out on the parapets of Edinborough Castle.

(Side note: we stopped at a pub and ordered fried fish for dinner, and after 40 minutes, asked the barkeep if it was ready. Stunned, he swore loudly, raced to the kitchen, apologized profusely, and after another 15 minutes, we got a free meal.)

These distractions meant we waited until about 11:30 to find a place to sleep, which (after being told "no vacancy" at many stops) relegated us to a hostel in a fairly impoverished neighborhood. I cocooned myself in the blanket they provided and, despite the crackling sound of the plastic mattress cover, I finally drifted off to sleep until awakened by the clanging on the metal door.

Something had apparently been stolen in the area, so they were going through the hostel, searching everyone's luggage. I walked away from my bunk in a somnambulistic haze. But while their hands unzipping and feeling through my luggage soon jarred me perfectly awake, I felt no less stunned.

One doesn't take one's constitution abroad. Scots law is very clear on the police's right to search you without a warrant if something's gone missing. I moreover realized that we were likely suffering this interrogation in no small part because the hostel was made up of 25% backpacking Americans and 75% poor people with nowhere else to go.

And while it is patently true that abuses like this are more common among the powerless even here in the U.S., that night I assuaged my bitterness with the knowledge that there was at least a piece of paper--a statement of principle--that said individual privacy still meant something back home. If we sadly fall short of it, then thank God we at least have something of which we are falling short.

So when someone tells you that we should go into "high crime" neighborhoods and just search for drugs without real probable cause since "we know they're there" or that "I don't care if the government taps my phone because I've got nothing to hide," remember that we have some profound liberties in the US, written into law by people who were conversant with violations of civil liberty in practical, rather than abstract, terms.

And, most certainly remember that freedoms are rarely taken from our citizens by force. Usually, in the name of security, or patriotism, or religion, or party, the citizens hand them right over.