Al (AKA TwinkleToes), You have certainly ignited a firestorm sized conflagration over national ID cards! Good for you, it might provoke thought. I have read through the thread and reserved judgement and comment, till now. There are obviously good intentions on both the pro and con sides. Everyone wants a good outcome, an improvement, let's don't just sit here, let's do something, even if it doesn't help.
Better to light a single candle that to forever curse the darkness. Yeah, if A L L the passengers and crew on the Titanic could have been issued thimbles and formed into a disciplined bucket brigade and worked feverishly untill they dropped, they would have all drowned because the boat was not salvagable by the means at hand.
I'm afraid that the national ID card would be as effective for actually preventing terrorist acts as the Brady bill and a bunch of other gun control legislation is at stopping criminals from using guns in the commision of felonies. It makes some of us feel as if we are at least doing something and it serves to further the agenda of those who use every imaginable emotional news item to ratchet tighter in their view of how WE should be controlled.
The Government is often guilty of form and appearance over substance because reality doesn't sell, make folks feel better, or serve anyones agenda. Right now the vox populi is clamoring for safety from terrorist attack and someone has a big pacifier in the form of a national ID card to slap in our collective mouth.
Caution, historical digression for example of Governmental indirection, follows:
Anyone here old enough to actually recall the aluminum pots and pan drives of WW II? Any students of history recall hearing about them? Many housholds suffered the privation of donating their aluminum cookware "to the cause", aluminum was needed for the war effort - planes, drop tanks, and all that. Americans came through, proudly in America's hour of need. As Paul Harvey would say, "and now for the rest of the story." The aluminum in the pots and pans was of such inferior quality that it was stockpiled and N O T used during the war. It was cheaper to refine "good" aluminum. This phony appeal to patriotism alowed Americans at all (would you believe most?) economic levels to "get in the mood" as other less easily agreed to "adjustments" were made to Americans every day lives. After the war, the Government sold the stockpiles of aluminum pots and pans to pots and pan manufacturers who melted them down and made, dare I say it, pots and pans out of it. Hoardes of ex military men, hungry for jobs after the war became door to door salesmen. One of the hot items in real demand was aluminum pots and pans.
Let us take care that what we support has a fair chance of success and actually thereby serves the intended purpose, not the agenda of any people who might co-opt our current patriotic zeal to further a different end than anti-terrorism. If I truly thought that carrying a national ID card would serve to actually prevent terrorist acts in and on Ameria, I would embrace the plan, knowing it would be perverted (my mistrust has many historic precidences) I would embrace it and urge others to do likewise.
Anyone recall the flop movie, "The Poseidan Adventure"? In it, two groups of survivors were moving through the upside down but still floating ship in the direction each group thought was the best hope for safety. They passed each other somewhere amidships, each making heartfelt entreaties to the other to come with them and live, each thinking the course of action by the other group to be suicide. Strength of conviction, eloquence of spokesmen, or cute sarcasms do nothing to change the reality of our experience. What major freedom affecting laws imposed on the American populace, e.g. gun control or what have you, has ever had the promised effect. This is not an argument over shades of grey. What gun use felonies were reduced? Few or none. Perhaps someone would slowly and patiently explain to me how, in fact, not suposition, my carrying an ID card would stop terrorism in the US or materially reduce it. I would bet a rootbeer float that any number of folks on the TBN could suggest a way to defeat virtually any supposed control institituted or supposedly augmented substantially by isueing national ID cards.
I suggest this ID card thing relationship to the recent terrorist acts is a red herring born in the intersection of two needs, 1. codependence between the populace's need for action and the Government's need to be perceived as acting A N D 2. the forces of evil behind our reductions in personal freedom, control in general (epitomized in gun control), and the reduction/removal of personal acountability.
Another brief historical footnote: Anyone recall the term Social Security Insurance (SSI) as opposed to our later use of the abbreviated form, Social Security? Well it seems that SSI was sold to the American populace as insurance. This was done for the simple fact that you couldn't, at the time, sell socialism. No one would have allowed socialism to be instituted at a national level, people would have barricaded the streets and turned out with torches and pitchforks. A clever marketing plan was devised. We'll call it insurance, everyone understands you pay for insurance and if something happens the insurance pays... Think this is historically innacurate? Well, it so happens that one of the main men behind the plan was interviewed on camera years later and freely admitted to having sold a very unpopular concept to the American people by renaming it. I saw it in an American History class. An example of paternalism, well intentioned but nevertheless selling socialism to folks to whom the very word was distasteful. Of course we were a tad more self reliant then, with personal accountability and all.
Lets be sure we understand what we are being sold and that it will work and not just sit in the corner wringing our hands and agreeing to anything remotely plausible while thinking any action is better than none. Wanna participate actively? Grab a thimble!
Patrick (still trying to learn how to put out a fire with larger and larger applications of gasoline)
