On Being "Taken into Custody"

My family has a history of getting nabbed at the border.

My Dad was, back in the early 1970s.  The border in question was the Ugandan border.  To be more specific, it was the international airport at Entebbe, as he arrived to report on a story.  When he landed, there were a half dozen soldiers waiting for the plane as it arrived at the gate.  "I wondered who they might be waiting for," Dad would recall.

They were waiting for him.  As he walked from the plane with the other passengers, the soldiers approached.  One of them pointed at Dad, and signaled him to leave the group.  "Me?" Dad mouthed, incredulous.  "You," said the soldier, grinning.  It was not a nice smile, as Dad recounted it.

My mom, who was back in Nairobi with three year old me and my infant brother, got the news that he had been taken into custody.  The US had been recently and publicly critical of the regime of Ugandan dictator General Idi Amin, and as a reprisal, the soldiers had been instructed to detain the first American journalist to enter the country.

So Dad just...disappeared.  Ugandan authorities weren't responsive to queries about his location or the reason for his detention.  

Eventually, Dad was deported, and the next word from him came after he was dumped off at a US consulate in Sudan.

Dad would tell this story on regular occasion, and it was always one of those things that I understood to be a marker of the difference between the United States of America and the authoritarian regimes of African strongmen.

That changed a little bit when I had the pleasure of being taken into custody at the American border.  

This was a couple of years after 9/11, after the creation of the Department for Homeland Security.  I, my wife, and my two sons were coming back from a visit with my brother in Montreal.  

When we arrived at American customs, we handed over our identification.  The agent scanned my wife's first.  Then he scanned mine.  Mine set off an audible klaxon at his station.  He looked at me, and stepped back and away from his computer.  As he did so, four more customs agents showed up in a hurry.  All had their guns out.  

I was told to exit our minivan, which I did.  I was then cuffed and frogmarched to a holding cell, where I was cuffed to a table.  I was told nothing about the reason for my arrest.  I was also not read my rights, or permitted any contact with my wife or with counsel. 

I mean sure, I was handcuffed and forcibly detained by agents with guns drawn, but it wasn't an "arrest."  I was just being "taken into custody."  Totally different thing.

After about fifteen minutes, I was released, with apologies.  Following review by an officer in charge, there'd been a misidentification, as the system they were using had incorrectly informed them that I was an armed and dangerous felon.  Oopsie doopsie.

After the agents who were tearing apart our van searching for contraband were stopped midway through their task were stopped, we were sent on our way. 

Impersonal and imperfect systems make mistakes.

As they can make mistakes now.  DHS and ICE aren't constrained to attend to your rights.  Maybe you're a citizen.  Maybe you're in the country legally.  Maybe not.  Not their problem.  They follow orders, and if sometimes innocent people are swept up, well, so what?  What does it matter if there's some collateral damage or bycatch?

ICE agents are already making mistakes, and acting on incorrect information.  Citizens in my area have been stopped and forcibly detained, and ICE agents are completely unaccountable for their actions towards those citizens. 

If you happen to have left your wallet at home that day, what happens?  If you don't always carry your papers with you, how could you prove anything, particularly if the agents in question are either overzealous or, you know, actually a little malicious?

As a soul with anarcholibertarian inclinations, I'm viscerally distrustful of systems of power and control.  The point of a Republic is to check those systems, to force those systems to be accountable for their behavior towards persons, to govern them round about with restraints that prevent them from becoming a tool for repression.  This is the dark paradox of the police state: In a police state, the law provides no protection.

ICE agents are already arresting people who have broken no laws, and whose only crime was to speak in ways the regime finds unacceptable.  For them, the law has become shifting sand.  You were here legally, but we've decided to revoke your legal status, so now you're breaking the law.   

It's as brazen as the corrupt and unaccountable cop in a dismal hollow of a town, the one who smashes your taillight, then tickets you for driving with a broken taillight, and should you be fool enough to protest, will arrest you for resisting arrest.

In such a system, all of our rights are in jeopardy.

Judge Moore and The Democracy Delusion

Out in the great state of Alabama, this election season is serving up an old familiar face. It's Ten Commandments Judge Rudy Ray Moore, getting himself back in black for some gubernatorial getback after his controversial stand on church and state.

Oh.

Hold on.

Judge Moore isn't who I think he is? He's not blaxploitation legend Dolomite? He's not the Human Tornado, a "nerve shattering, brain battering, mind splattering One Man Disaster?"

Wow.

That does explain a whole lot, but given the similarities, you can understand my confusion. My bad. Learn something new every day.

Anyhoo, Roy Moore is now a contender in the race for governor in Alabama, and he's running on basically the same platform that has defined his career to date. He's all about arguing for the unity of faith and country, for making the case that if our nation loses faith in God, we'll come apart. His entire political platform can be summed up in this little quote from the Religion News Service:

"For the government to acknowledge God is not a violation of the Constitution...to deny God is to begin to take away rights. In the long run, the welfare of our state depends on the blessings of God."

Judge Moore has, shall we say, a rather interesting approach to church and state. What struck me most in this little statement, though, is that second proposition: "...to deny God is to begin to take away rights."

How can one even think that? Faith is hardly a requirement for participation in our republic. Never has been. How can belief be correlated with the rights of citizens in a democratic society? I'm fairly sure that Judge Moore doesn't have an answer to that one that goes beyond just reiterating the above statement.

However, that doesn't mean that there isn't an answer.

The answer lies in a painful truth: Our rights in our democratic republic have no objective reality. Yeah, I know, I know, "we hold these truths to be self-evident." But that statement is not scientifically provable. Our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot be established definitively on a foundation of empirical reason. Yes, you can make that argument. There is much to commend democratic societies.

But I'm sure there's a very smart, very articulate staff member of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China who would be willing to explain just why our "rights" aren't really self-evident. He'd point to the provable economic success of his nation, to their global ascendence, to their clear financial and organizational superiority, and to their diligent "management" of public opinion and "unconstructive" dissent. "Show me these 'rights' you speak of," he might purr. "I see no evidence for them. I see only chaos and decadence and self-indulgent decay." He would then suggest that, given all of the material and empirical evidence in his favor, perhaps we are just deluding ourselves.

And in a sense, we are deluding ourselves.

Our liberty stands when we are willing to assert it, to "hold it" not as a scientifically defensible theory to be proven or unproven, but as a defining value. As with any value worth holding, freedoms exist because together we choose to believe in them, and affirm them, and live them out, even in the face of cooly rational arguments to the contrary.

Though it's not anywhere near what Judge Moore thinks, there is a deep connection between belief and liberty, between faith and our freedoms.

Health Care is Not a Right

This last week in the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey managed to cheese off his entire customer base by arguing vigorously against health care reform. His position is that the market should be in control of health care provision, because health care is a service like any other service. It's not a surprising position for the Chief Executive Officer of a for profit corporation, even if the clientele of that corporation happen to be wealthy progressives who are almost universally in favor of a more progressive approach to health care.

In his article, though, Mackey went well beyond arguing for market-based options, and dug down to the philosophical heart of the conservative case against socialized medicine. That case, in his words, rests on this foundation:

While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.

I'm not quite sure how careful a reading of our founding documents went into this statement. As I recall, our Declaration of Independence includes this little statement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Some folks might argue that medical care, food and shelter are things without which that first little inalienable right is not possible.

But I'm not going to make that case, tempting though it may be.

Instead, I'm going to agree with Mr. Mackey.

Providing health care to all is not a right, at least not as "rights" are shallowly understood among Americans whose sense of moral commitment begins and ends with themselves. It is not something that I demand for myself, because I am owed it. Instead, I view the provision of health care to all as a moral responsibility. Not a right. A responsibility.

In that sense, Mr. Mackey has pegged it. Food, shelter, and medical care are all similar. Food is not a "right," but we as an ethical people would not tolerate folks starving to death in our midst. Shelter is not a "right," but those of us who have shelter recognize that we have a basic moral responsibility towards those who would otherwise suffer. Where the ethic of the market fails, and Lord does it fail, nonprofits and government are forced to step in.

For those whom the market has failed, or who have run out of resources to participate in "mutually beneficial market exchanges" with their oncologist, we are..as a people..morally obligated to provide care. Government, as an instrument in the hands of an ethical people, needs be a significant component of that care.

That option is worth pursuing not because we want it for ourselves. It is worth it because we as moral actors recognize that it is the most effective way to provide care for others.

Why conservative and putatively Christian Americans can't recognize this is beyond me.