Nothing would do, it seemed, but to close Guantanamo and extend constitutional protections to the enemy operatives held there. So, just as soon as the Obama administration figures out where to stash the delightful inhabitants of Guantanamo, we'll shutter the camp. Meanwhile, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 catastrophe awaits criminal trial in New York City, with all due constitutional protections.
A steady procession of events like this takes its toll in terms of civic morale. Americans grow suspicious -- of each other. Maybe it's all just a mix-up, this terrorism business. Maybe they don't really want to kill us -- just wake us up to their concerns? Maybe?
A little bit more indisputable is the harm our ambivalence about means and ends in the terror war is wreaking on national morale. A nation that consents to take its shoes off at the airport, and to abstain from the urgency of the restroom, without equating sacrifice to necessity -- that nation would seem headed for nervous breakdown. If, indeed, it hasn't already had one.
There isn't much human dignity in meek acceptance of unnecessary hardships, such as submission to manhandling in the process of innocent travel. Yet on a generally received sense of dignity everything worthwhile depends. Our leaders seem not to understand the harm they do the American spirit by handcuffing rather than liberating it so as to get a vital job done -- the extinction of (even if, shhh, we can't say it) terrorism rooted in the hatreds and phobias of too many Muslims.
First things first: smash the people whose legacy is restroom lockouts and airport shoe inspections. Then ask them if they care to lodge any human rights complaints.