Argumentative Essay On Safety Vs Freedom

Man has always strived for the ultimate form of stability. The world that forged our ancestors was a dangerous place, rife with disease, sparse with food, stricken with environmental harshness, brimming with beasts. They wanted to live in a world where the power of fear was lessened, where they could live longer, where they were safe. The societies we live in today were created to ensure that base standard of safety that Mencken observes all men desire. Mencken, however, misunderstands full extent of safety the average man desires, and in doing so he rules freedom as a separate entity, when truly the nature of freedom and safety are more intertwined than one may think. We live in a society that when presented a choice between personal

The NSA can trawl through the cellphone history of the entirety of America, no-one bats an eye. A man can be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo, and it is shrugged off as a triviality. When such matters are brought up the classic response from any giver politician will be along the lines, “It’s a matter of security, don’t you want to be safe?”. I don’t see the safety the claim to be weaving when they say this, I see the words of Thomas Jefferson – “Any nation that would trade freedom for security would deserve neither and lose both”. Thomas Jefferson understood that freedom was more than a beautiful idea. The inalienable rights that he and his colleagues would lay as the foundation of fledgling nation were the lifeblood of a successful society. They had come to understand that freedom and safety didn’t exist on opposite sides of spectrum, as we are so often duplicitously lead to believe; freedom is the ultimate form of safety. What is safety? At it’s most base it is the lack of potential to harm

We have trigger warning and censorship on University campuses. We have people being critiqued for every perceived slight by the hordes of people who hide behind a username on social media. We live in age of outrage, where the idea of freedom seems to be continuously superseded with a need to protect the feelings of others rather than the right to an opinion; we live in age of fear, where the threat of terrorism seems to be omnipresent, always lurking in the shadows – but we live in the West, and regardless of the minor blemishes that stain us at the moment, and vitriol that fills the news we read, the idea of freedom is alive and well in the majority of the populace. The average man still has a belief in the democratic system. The average man still believes in the value of individual rights. Jefferson also remarked, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.“ I still see that vigilance today, and I feel safe for it. When a controversial bill is brought forward, like C-51, there is pushback. There are protests, petitions, picketing. When there is hypocrisy within the government, like Trudeau’s pay-to-play scandal, one can speak out without fear of retribution. We have a fair court system that maintains the values the country was built upon, but more importantly we have court of public opinion that cares. People care - and as long as they continue to- we will be free and, in extension