American Cowardice

Three letters today, from the Reader's Page of Newsweek. These letters are in response to a recent article regarding the NSA domestic surveillance program. These letters make me sick. In an age where the term antipatriotic is bandied about far too frequently, I still don't hesitate for a moment to label this line of thinking as the most antipatriotic, dangerous sentiment currently enjoying a solid foothold in the American consciousness.

Your May 22 cover asks a good question: "What Else Don't We Know?" Well, before September 11 we didn't know there was a band of bloodthirsty killers in our country plotting to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol and kill as many Americans as they could. The era of fearing Big Brother is over. There is a real threat now - not to our precious privacy rights (an interesting idea for a people who seem to need to broadcast the most intimate aspects of their lives on television or advertise themselves on MySpace.com), but to our lives. The terrorists hate us and they want us dead. We have a choice: hold up sophomoric ideas of a more innocent time or accept the responsibilities of our current time. If we chose the first, we can expect more 9/11s.

Michael

Your cover headline screaming spying on your calls is unacceptably misleading. The only spying being done by the NSA is keeping a record of the numbers that someone has called, both from and to the telephones involved, for data-mining purposes. Both numbers are entered into a massive database without the recording of a single word. This is exactly the same information that is recorded by the telephone companies for billing purposes, and is similar to the data mining done by supermarkets and credit-card companies. Most citizens have nothing to hide in the numbers being called from their telephones, and if this technology can prevent another terrorist attack on us, I vigorously support its continued utilization.

M. Robert

Here in the Midwest no one cares about the government's "Spying on Your Calls." I could not imagine the government or anyone else wanting to listen in on everyday, mundane calls that people make. But if this is all it has to do, then let it do it. After 9/11 whatever the government does is just fine by me. After all, we have had no attacks since then.

Frank

The emphasis is mine, meant to designate the exact sentence in each letter that caused my throat to fill with bile. I realize that these people are just ignorant, undereducated, and scared. That doesn't make their opinion less dangerous, however, nor does it soften the blow to the core of this nation that would result if a solid majority of Americans were equally willing to sacrifice the heart of our nation for a flimsy sense of security. I'm not going to resort to telling these people to get out of the country, because that's trite and misguided. I will, however, call them anti-American cowards, and state vociferously that it is only with the most shameful weakness imaginable that anyone could agree with them.

I don't really have too much else to say about these sentiments. This is how the terrorists will beat us. If we'd rather be safe than free, then we give up who we are as a nation, and what makes us great. If we think that little civil liberty abuses are no big deal, or not big enough to worry about, we allow a leak that will slowly but surely become a flood. The patriots who built this nation stood firm against the threats of their enemies, refusing to compromise their principles for any reason. What a sad legacy that Americans today are willing to accept autocracy when faced with such relatively weak enemies.