Alert, Alerter, Alertest :: September 11 Terrorism Essays

Alert, Alerter, Alertest   Our military at home and around the sphere is on mellow natty status and we have taken the necessary security precautions to underwrite the functions of your government. President George W. Bush, September 11, 2001   As an American, I am on a state of high horrify much of the time. I tend to be alert to inequities, discrimination, intolerance, injustice, restriction of liberty. Give me liberty or give me death, was Patrick Henrys cry. reside Free or Die is New Hampshires motto.   I am alert to affronts to democracy. My American nervous system is on alert, like a booby detector, to tell me of dangers and threats. I have American sensors, receptors, antennae. They are set to split up any trace of insults and injuries to the American stylus of life.   We Americans have a sensitivity to mistreatment of people, to bias, prejudice, abridgements of democratic principles. Weve got 10 of them in our secular form of the decennium Command ments of Moses. But more than this bill of particulars, our Bill of Rights, we have additional rights. They accommodate the Declaration of Independences inalienable rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.   They probably include Franklin D. Roosevelts Four Freedoms- The number one is license of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.   The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, manner economic understandings which depart secure to every nation a wakeless peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of natural aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world. (Jan. 6, 1941)   In ad dition to such evident statements, we are concerned about other rights that are implicit. And we are alert to them as well. Social conscience is one form of our patriotism.   A patriot of democracy believes in disagreement, in unpopular ideas, thoughts, and opinions. What is unpatriotic is mob behavior, complacency, conformity, when everyone does the analogous thing.