Restructuring Freedom

We must not let our societies be debased to these levels where the death of innocents is expected. Police killing civilians should never be accepted as 'something that might happen again.' It is a difficult balance, and I don't fault the London police. I can't imagine the pressure they are under, and when someone looks suspicious and runs from you -- onto crowded trains, no less -- you have to assume the worst. But in today's world the worst means he is going to blow himself up and kill you and others, so the only way to stop him is to kill him first. So I sympathize with their situation and can't say that I probably would have done anything different. But we cannot accept that 'these kinds of things happen' and expect them to happen again. This is a tragedy. And it should be seen as such. And it may happen again, and if it does it will be tragic, not acceptable collateral damage. I think the same can be said of the battlefield -- we ought to do everything we can to avoid killing innocents and see it as a tragedy when we do. But even more so when its police officers killing civilians, because we all live in some police presence most of the time. If we're constantly afraid that the police might kill us then they are inflicting many of the same psychological wounds as the terrorists. I suppose that if you are taken with utilitarian ethics you would say that as long as less than 52 civilians are killed for every terrorist who is stopped then we're breaking even. Anything better is an improvement. But I don't think that you ought to view human life that way, and I think that most people agree with me. And that's not the kind of world any of us wants to live in, anyway. Instead we need to work to cut the loss of life to zero, anything less is a failure. I'm not saying that the London police are incompetent, or even that London and Great Britain have a different policy than the one I've laid out above, but I'm just worried that cold, calculating voices among the media and politicians may reduce Western society to one that accepts the loss of innocent life as long as it is lost while combating evil. And I know this is one of the great arguments against the war -- that we are causing thousands of civilian deaths. And its true that we are, and each one is a tragedy. And we should work hard to cause no more. I think that is the US policy, I know that we take far greater measures than any other military that I've ever heard of to make sure that we cause as few civilian deaths as possible. Only the backwards and heartless few estimate collateral damage to be a remorseless cost of war, and they are truly a small minority in our armed forces. Our servicemen and women, in general, work hard to save as many lives as possible, and that is commendable and the only rational way to live.

Meanwhile stateside, politicians continue to prove that they don't really care about the Americans killed fighting this war, only the politics that come out of it. Way to go, bloodsuckers.