What is true national security? Recent answers to this question focus on the U.S. military, Homeland Security, various intelligence agencies, and the like. The “threat” is usually defined as foreign terrorists, primarily of the Islamist variety; marauding immigrants, mainly of the Mexican variety; and cyber hackers, often of the Russian variety. To “secure” the homeland, to make us “safe,” the U.S. government spends in the neighborhood of $750 billion, each and every year, on the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA (and there are roughly 15 more agencies after those two goliaths).
But what makes people truly secure? How about a living wage, decent health care, and quality education? Affordable housing? Some time off to decompress, to pursue one’s hobbies, to connect with family and friends, to continue to grow as a human being? Water without lead, air without toxins, land without poisons?
These thoughts came to me as I read the usual anodyne statement put out by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, nominated as President Trump’s new National Security Adviser. “The safety of the American people and the security of the American homeland are our top priorities,” McMaster said in his statement.
I agree that safety and security are important, but I wouldn’t place them as America’s top priorities, even in the realm of national defense. Our top priority is supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution, including all those rights and freedoms that are often threatened in nervous and excitable times. Institutions like the press, freedoms like the right to assemble and protest, the right to individual privacy, and the like.
When the powerful threaten those freedoms, as President Trump is doing by denouncing the press as the enemy of the people, that very act is a bigger threat to national security than ISIS or illegal immigrants or Russian hackers or what-have-you.
Security is not just about weapons and warriors and killing terrorists and other “bad hombres,” and safety is not just about guarding your money and property or even your person from physical harm. Safety and security draw their strength from our Constitution, our communities, and our societal institutions, not only those that catch and punish criminals, but those that enlighten us, those that make us better, those that enrich our souls.
In the USA, we have a very narrow and negative definition of safety and security. It’s a definition that’s been increasingly militarized, much like our government, over the last few decades.
We’d be wise to broaden and deepen our view of what security and safety really mean; we’d be especially wise not to allow leaders like Donald Trump to define them for us. In their minds, security and safety mean doing what you’re told while shutting up and paying your taxes.
Kneeling before General Zod (to cite Superman for a moment) or indeed any other leader is not what I call safety and security.
Update: Just after I wrote this, I saw these two headlines from today: “Trump on deportations: ‘It’s a military operation,'” and “Trump adviser Bannon assails media at CPAC: Of media coverage of Trump, Steve Bannon said: ‘It’s not only not going to get better — it’s going to get worse every day… they’re corporatist, globalist media.'”
There you have it: militarization (at least of rhetoric) and scapegoating of the media before the fact. Judge Trump, Bannon, and Co. by their deeds, but also by their words.
Update 2: Last night, a PBS report noted that the USA, with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for 80% of opioid prescriptions. The overuse of powerful and addictive painkillers points to serious problems in national morale. Even as many Americans have poor access to health care or overpay for it, America itself is awash in prescription drugs, many of them either highly expensive or highly addictive, or both. This reliance on prescription drugs is a sign of a complex communal malaise, yet the government seems most focused on policing the use of marijuana, which is now legal in many states.