Another opinion: [url]http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ucrr/20011218/cm/_quot_give_me_liberty_or_quot_shut_up_ya_bum__1.html[/url]
Op/Ed - Richard
Tuesday December 18 05:51 PM EST
"GIVE ME LIBERTY OR" ... SHUT UP, YA BUM!
By Richard Reeves
NEW YORK -- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," said a prominent Philadelphian, a guy named Benjamin Franklin.
Well, he better not try peddling that kind of stuff in Sacramento, capital of the great state of California.
Actually, someone did try to say something like that in Sacramento last Saturday, at the mid-year graduation ceremonies of California State University. She was booed and heckled off the stage.
The speaker forced to shut up after five minutes was Janis Besler Heaphy, president and publisher of the Sacramento Bee, the local paper. I, for one, am proud to be in the same business as she is. These are the best of times for us, when we are unpopular. The reason she was booed -- apparently more by parents than by students in the crowd of more than 17,000 -- was because the other great institutions of our society will not talk about civil liberties at a time of crisis. We are not here to print interviews with Tom Cruise; we are here to say necessary things many do not want to hear.
We are here to say the emperor has no clothes. Or, at least the emperor's spokesman, Ari Fleischer (news - web sites), who has nakedly told us to watch what we say. That is not the way it works. We're here to watch Ari Fleischer and his boss.
Heaphy was doing just fine at the beginning of her speech, when she was a bit vague, saying: "Decisions made in the near-term will shape America's future -- your future." The trouble began when she began to move toward the specific: "No one argues the validity and need for both retaliation and security. But to what lengths are we willing to go to achieve them? ... To what degree are we willing to compromise our civil liberties in the name of security? ... We simply cannot protect freedom by forsaking freedom."
Ah, Mr. Franklin's concerns.
Then the mob began to form rhetorically when she said she was talking about racial profiling, holding aliens without charges against them and trying suspects in secret military tribunals.
She was hard to hear after that and finally had to quit. She had been silenced.
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