The portraits of some of our nation’s founders hang in a hushed gallery of the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville. A strange and interesting thing about Benjamin Franklin’s: His eyes shine with a wisdom and spirit and clarity that seem one with time. He looks alive.
In a way, one evening last week, he was.
On Jan. 9, some of old Ben’s wise words were quoted in an auditorium just down the hall from where his portrait hangs:
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The blunt radicalism of Franklin’s statement, first jotted or uttered more than two centuries ago, resonated with the 2002 crowd just as it resonated with his 1776 contemporaries.
No matter that so much time had passed. No matter that the nation he forged with his passion and genius had been transformed by succeeding passions and genius. The basics of Franklin’s age that framed discussion and action then — constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and liberties — still frame the structure of who we are (or who we think we are) and what is precious to us.
And that’s why his words were so appropriate to the roundtable discussion of “Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism,” held last Wednesday evening in the auditorium of the Speed Art Museum, just down the hall from where Franklin’s eyes still shone.
The Courier-Journal sponsored the session. We thought it was important, given the ongoing debate about our civil liberties since a law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush broadened police and government powers to fight terrorism.
We assembled a panel of folks with expertise of the law and history — Jonathan Dyar, a local prosecutor; Jon Fleischaker, a Louisville attorney who wrote the state’s open records laws; David Friedman, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky; Thomas Mackey, chairman of the University of Louisville History Department; Stephen Pence, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky; and Paul Weber, a U of L political science professor and author of numerous books and articles about civil liberties.
And we invited you to add your voices and your perspectives to the discussion.
Portions of the discussion can be found on the newspaper’s Web site at www.courier-journal.com
Panelists and members of the public raised a variety of absorbing issues: the abuses and protections of government, the incursions into personal privacy, the striving toward a balance between security and freedom, the dreadful advent of suicide as a weapon of war, the uncertainty of immigrants’ futures in this country, the specter of never knowing what government will do in secrecy, the use of military tribunals to dispense justice.
No vaporous concepts, those. For two hours, folks in Louisville came together to talk about those very real issues of American Life 2002.
If there was any consensus at the end of the discussion, it was this: It’s probably too early to tell what effects or implications the new anti-terrorism law will have on us, and it was important to discuss our concerns publicly and to stay on top of this.
The civil liberties session inaugurated a yearlong effort by The Courier-Journal to hold such public discussions about issues in the news.
Public debate is critical to who we are (or who we think we are) and what is precious to us. Still.
This notion is as old as we are as a people. In 1765, it was John Adams who wrote movingly of our destiny as Americans and laid out the prescription for enduring liberty.
No vaporous concept, that.
In an art museum where treasures of our heritage hang, I believe I saw a moving, living portrait of democracy in action. It was the good people of Louisville who, no matter what their point of view, breathed new life and meaning into these words of John Adams:
“Whenever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. . . .
“Let the public disputations become researches into the grounds and nature and ends of government and the means of preserving the good and demolishing the evil. Let the dialogues, and all the exercises, become the instruments of impressing on the tender mind, and of spreading and distributing far and wide, the ideas of right and the sensations of freedom.
“In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.”
