Freedom vs. safety

We Americans love freedom. It was freedom that drove our early ancestors here in the first place. From the beginning we were able to hook a team of horses to a wagon and go from the east coast to the west without getting permission from anyone. Of course, the Native Americans weren’t thrilled about that, but our forefathers wouldn’t let anything stop them from going anywhere they wanted to go.

There are countries in the world where freedom of travel is limited and in some countries you have to get permission if you plan to go very far. As an example, I was on military duty in Germany in 1970. I had a few days off, and I wanted to go behind the Berlin Wall to see for myself what life is like in the Russian zone of East Berlin.

I knew as an American in a military uniform I could travel about anywhere I wanted to go without a visa or a passport, but to go behind the Berlin Wall I would have to have written permission from the German authorities. So I applied for a permit and got one.

I flew by Lufthansa from Frankfort to Berlin. At the Berlin city bus terminal I got on a bus that was going to take passengers through the wall to East Berlin. All the passengers had permits to visit relatives, official reasons or tourists for just a few hours. The bus

stopped a few yards short of the gate at Check Point Charlie, and we were told to get out of the bus and stand nearby. We did and East German guards dressed in light gray wool uniforms with a splash of red on the caps and collars had a two-wheel dolly with a mirror between the wheels. They used it to push under the chassis of the bus to check for contraband or someone hiding under the bus. However, they went on laughingly pushing the mirror under the women’s dresses to take a peek. The husbands and boyfriends of the ladies showed signs of anger and disapproval, but did nothing because we had been told to do nothing that might cause an international event.

When we got back on the bus a hard core Russian Major stepped on board. He was dressed in his standard Russian officer uniform of black boots, black trousers, red tunic and German Luger strapped in his pistol belt strapped to his hip. Next to him in my American military uniform I’m sure I looked like Little Loyd Fauntleroy or Polly Anna and he looked like General George Patton.

With a Charlton Heston voice he told us that as we passed through the gate we were not to take any pictures. He got off the bus and as we passed through the gate you could hear the click, click, click of the cameras. One of the points of this epistle is that Americans

don’t take orders from tyrants very well. We have always been free to do whatever we want to do.

In East Berlin everything is quite and subdued. Everything was a facade. The front walls of the buildings were up, but behind those walls was rubble still left from WW II. There was no normal shopping or business going on. There were Russian buses with Russian citizens dressed in their Sunday finest to impress Westerners how well they were doing under Communism.

In contrast, on the west side of the wall the Berliners were conducting their usual hustle and bustle of that you will find in any free city in the world.

I met a Fraulein on the porch of a huge war memorial building just across the street from the parking lot where the infamous book burnings took place during WW II. We got into a conversation with my limited ability to speak German, and as she spotted a Russian KGB agent who had been tailing me all afternoon she went away.

I started off by saying how much Americans cherish our freedom. Now we have a microscopic virus that is forcing us to curtail our freedom to provide safety for ourselves and others. For the first time in American history, we will now have to learn to strike a balance between how much freedom we are willing to sacrifice for safety.