Shall We Be Citizens or Subjects?

Shall we be citizens or subjects?

At what point does the erosion of liberty in the interest of state security become a real and present danger to the very nature of the society the state purports to protect?

If, in the process of making our society more secure, we are fundamentally changed as a nation, can one make the argument that we, as a nation, actually benefited from being made more secure?

Are we more secure when we worry more about the potential tyranny resulting from the internal mechanisms of state security established to combat external threats rather than external threats themselves?

When the state no longer believes itself to be bound by the written constitutional compact it has made with its citizens, at what point does its legitimacy begin to falter and wain in the eyes of its citizens?

Again I ask, shall we be citizens or subjects? Thomas Jefferson understood the distinction very clearly. It is the reason the word subjects was removed from a draft of the Declaration of Independence and the word citizens took its place (discovered through hyperspectral imaging) for being subject to the crown was to be regarded as an anathema in the new republic. In our present day, the American government has no right to make subjects of its citizens and we should proudly and fiercely guard our liberties even if these freedoms are some times at odds with the purported goals of increased national security.

The essential security of a nation is paramount to its existence (no nation can exist without being free from destruction), but only when there exists a balance between security and liberty does the state more appropriately serve the interests of its citizens.

One must be careful not to let the pendulum swing too far in either direction lest you risk the rise of tyranny or anarchy.

-JT