Our entire nation--the world--seems to be locked into the idea that better locks give us better protection. Yet, anyone looking at how we live our lives must see that all these multiple, ever more sophisticated locks, don't do much to protect, only make us more paranoid. Thinking "security" makes life unnecessarily difficult and complicated. We talk about protecting our liberty but it is our freedom we sacrifice.

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I have a memory of a saying, probably in a language other than English, from the dim and dusty reaches of my childhood. I don't remember the words, but the meaning has remained crystal clear. "As soon as someone invents a new lock, someone else will invent a key to open it."

Isn't that obvious?

I have a lock on the door to my house, but I know, of course, that if someone really would want to enter, for whatever dark purpose, it would be easy to jimmy the lock, or slide open any of the windows. Or kick in the door.

Our entire nation--the world--seems to be locked into the idea that better locks give us better protection. Yet, anyone looking at how we live our lives must see that all these multiple, ever more sophisticated locks, don't do much to protect, only make us more paranoid. Thinking "security" makes life unnecessarily difficult and complicated. We talk about protecting our liberty, but it is our freedom we sacrifice.

In times past--and not that long past either--we lived much less stressful lives when we never locked our doors; we knew all our neighbors. And we accepted that now and then "shit happens." There is no security in life. People die, get sick, there are wind storms that lift tiles off the roof, frost breaks water pipes, lightning strikes, someone goes crazy. Perhaps we called it bad luck; we wore amulets to give us luck. And, of course, we wrapped our water pipes with insulation and secured our roofs as well as we could, but there was never a guarantee. Insulation gets old, or rats eat it; pipes rust. Things get old; we ourselves get old. Life is dangerous to your life, we used to say. We accepted the risks and enjoyed glorious sunrises.

I remember the first insurance salesman that tried to sell us life insurance. I remember my awe at the thought that "life" could be insured. Then auto insurance, health insurance, flight insurance. I learnedt that Lloyd's of London insures literally everything and anything (for a price): the face of a movie star, the ride in an experimental balloon, the colors of a painting.
A little thought should make clear that insurance is just another way to make money. Very rarely does what they pay out comes close to what thy bring in. It is, on the whole, a lucrative business.

What insurance could not protect us from was bad intentioned humans, who used their creativity to think of ever more sly ways to do harm. It takes only one apple with a razor blade inserted to make us suspicious of all apples. It takes one bottle of poisoned pills to make us seal all bottles of anything in layers of plastic, more and more difficult to remove. It takes only one shoe in which someone has hidden a knife (or whatever dangerous thing it was) for millions of people to have to take their shoes off when passing through the security checks at airports. In America it is almost impossible to buy food, or anything else for that matter, that is not sold sealed in plastic.

There must be a thousand new laws designed to protect us. And if laws and law enforcers do not help (enough) we build walls. The Russians started that perhaps in a divided Germany. No, the Chinese made a wall around their country thousands of years ago. Israel built a ten foot concrete wall to... what? Separate Palestine from Israel?. Now the United States is going to build a wall to keep "illegals" out (a 700 mile wall along a 2000 mile border with Mexico; and then, of course, there is the border with Canada, and thousands of miles of sea coast--walls?). In the Middle Ages the aristocracy (in other countries we call them war lords) built castles that were fortresses, surrounded by a wall and then a moat..

Does all this protect us? Perhaps it just makes us feel safer.

I remember a stay in a long house once (in Borneo). A whole village in one house. Each family, or group of people (they weren't all "family" I was told) has a space, but there is very little to mark this space from the the next. There is little or no "privacy," that something we now call a Right. In a conversation with the head man, one of our party of visitors asked whether they had ever had dividers, or screens. The head man laughed. Yes, someone had tried that, but it made other people suspicious of those people. What do they hide? The screen had been removed after a day.

Why our need for locks, doors, walls? Is it because we acquired more and more stuff, spent more and more money buying the latest gadgets? We had so much invested that we got panicked? Or that some of us got much richer and others got poorer? Is it the difference in wealth that has created more desperate people? Reagan assured us that wealth trickles down. Well, if it does, it trickles mighty slowly. We used to count a few millionaires, now we count billionaires, but people in the wider and wider lower reaches of the pyramid have to work two or three jobs just to eat. Is that why we need locks?

America prides itself on being the richest nation on earth. America also has the greatest percentage of people in prison, the largest number of citizens without health insurance, the greatest chasm between rich and poor, and the poor are multiplying much faster than the rich. We certainly are the nation that spends the most on arms of all kinds, and we don't hesitate to use our military clout to meddle in the affairs of other nations. For greed, or for security? Or just hubris?
World war two is now more than half a century behind us, and in that time there are an amazing number of countries in which we have effected "regime change". Is it remarkable that some, perhaps many, of them remember and resent?

There is a strange human trait: if one person fears (whatever it is he fears) and invents a lock, a fence, a moat, a rifle (originally invented for hunting for food, then converted to self-defense, so-called)--others also have to have that new lock. Fear is contagious.
Once one manufacturer invents a "tamper-proof" closing for his bottle of aspirin, other manufacturers must follow, even improve the design. Now every container is sealed with at least three seals.
A rustic wooden fence is laughable today; now we make fences of steel mesh, barbed wire, razor wire.

And so we have come to today's world with fortified boundaries (of course, planes fly over invisible lines drawn on maps). We plant land mines. The arms race has never even slowed down, probably because it is immensely lucrative and hidden from prying eyes. If one country has a "nuclear device," another will want one also, and another and another. Isn't that obvious?

Can you think of any ending other than unimaginable disaster?

Certainly, I can imagine a calm head slowly, carefully, making friends, shaking hands with neighbors, reaching out. And also, at the same time, getting rid of his own nuclear devices. That will take time. But where are the calm heads in a time of mass hysteria? Evidently it takes only one ruler to fan the fires of fear with ever more elaborate "security" measures, devices, warnings, and threats.

Either someone has to have enough faith to actually destroy his own weapons of mass destruction--unilateral disarmament--or disaster.

We made a big to do about "weapons of mass destruction," although it was never explained what weapons of mass destruction are. Chemical weapons like phosphoris? Quantities of the stuff that causes infectious diseases? Nuclear weapons?. What was never mentioned, or even commented upon, is that we ourselves have those weapons of mass destriuction. We probably have the greatest number and the most sophisticated WMD. We probably produce them and sell them to the highest bidder; our weapons industry is unmatched in the world. Are cluster bombs weapons of mass destruction? We sell those, we now know.

Locks and walls and checkpoints have multiplied exponentially now that we are in a war, as the president likes to remind us, a War on Terror.

We are still fighting another war, a War on Drugs. We make laws to protect us from drugs. 'Drugs' meaning only a certain class of substances that someone at some time considered harmful. It drove commerce in those substances underground, which means huge profits were (are) made by drug dealers, manufacturers and growers, but no tax collected. The War on Drugs led to many other, more stringent laws, punishing those who provided what the public was willing to pay for, but also users (abusers, who should be treated rather than prosecuted). After spending billions of dollars over the last however many years, the percentage of the population that uses drugs has barely changed--but the drugs have changed to ever more vicious and now truly dangerous ones. Professional athletes cannot use performance-enhancing drugs; yet records continue to be broken. According to what i read recently, the use of anabolic steroids (and other chemical enhancers) has spread to high school students, perhaps even younger eager athletes.

Are we safer from drugs? Safer from terror? Who knows. But it is obvious that we are more and more enmeshed in webs of secrecy and subterfuge. Life has become more dangerous, not because of some faraway terror organization, but because of our own laws. Supposedly to make us safer we have inserted our armed might in the hot spot of the globe. where, according to reports, terrorist organizations are finding many new recruits.
Our government identifies dangerous people, locks them up (all over the world, we are told) to keep them out of the game. These "detainees" are not accused of having done anything (yet), but we suspect they might want to, if we let them loose. Keeping a few hundred potential terrorists behind bars (or even thousands) is supposed to lessen the threat of terror attacks in this country. However, the number of young men, and women, who volunteer their lives as "suicide bombers" (martyrs, as they are called in Arab countries( has never decreased.
Are we going to lock up people who might perhaps want to use drugs? Should we lock up men--they match the profile--who might, perhaps, abuse their wives or children? Or lock away accountants who might, one day, do who knows what to the books of the company they work for?

It does not take much psychology to understand that such preventive detaining of people not charged with anything, must have an effect. Not deterrence, but rather the opposite: indignation, anger, that can only lead to more terrorists. Our secret detention and torture cannot but lead to more terror and greater torture if we ever were to fall in the hands of "the enemy."

There is a big debate about "illegal" immigrants. (The people are not illegal, but what they do is). A wall, or fence, is to be built, 700 miles long, which is supposed to keep people out. Private armies of vigilantes have been formed.
Our president says that the desperate peolple who literally risk their lives to come to this country are attracted by our democracy, our rights. No, they come to work hard and earn some money.
If we don't want Spanish-speaking people in our country, it would be much cheaper, and in the long run more effective, to invest the money we now spend to apprehend, prosecute, and persecute, in Mexico, creating Mexican jobs.

But we cannot think that way. All we can think of is making better locks.

We're not solving problems.
Our reaction to problems IS the problem.

Okay. So we have at least fifteen different intelligence-gathering institutions. Find the guy who put a razor blade in the apple. Charge him with a crime, put him in prison. Find the people who poison aspirin bottles, charge him, put him in prison. As to drugs, I suggest we ask some experts to make some distinctions between what we now call "drugs.' Some we now know to be fairly innocent, few if any people have commited big crimes under the influence of marijuana. Alcohol is a great deeal more dangerous, not just for the people who drink, but also to their victims. Crack cocain is really bad stuff, and so is 'ice.' if we want to control drugs, lets be more scientific and more selective.

Terrorism is a problem. But, people so motivated that they are willing--some say eager--to give their lives, have a problem. Let's find out what they are so angry about. I am sure they do not envy us because we have democracy, or rights (our rights are steadily bering squeezed away from us by our own leaders anyway). It must be something much more basic, of long duration. Let's talk to them. What are they mad about? I've heard it is a reaction to our rude, crude voices and actions all over the world, for the last fifty or more years. It is true that we have meddled in other people's governments, we have manipulated and bullied, we have put dictators in power and supported them, until we turned around and wanted them gone. It's true that our pop culture has little depth, and might offend people who have different ideas about what is proper (it offends people in this country). Let's talk!

But we don't talk.

And then a small group of people in the very heart of our country is attacked by a madman, killing five of their children, wounding five more. At one of the funerals the grandfather says to the family of the killer: We forgive you, don't fear us.
The Amish live their belief.
They have no locks, and accept that occasionally there are mad people who do gruesome things.

If they had reacted as we--most of us apparently--reacted to the horror of 9/11, they would have attacked the house the madman had sought shelter in. Killed the madman's wife and children, captured and interrogated (tortured) friends of the madman, or even suspected acquaintances.

But the Amish don't judge; who are we to judge? They talk to their enemies--no, they have no enemies, they forgive because they live their indomitable faith

What if we had truly believed that our way of life is best for all people, and believed the faith we so religiously profess, so that when mad men destroyed buildings, and killed 3000 people, we had said, We forgive you; let's talk, we want to understand why you are so angry.
The world would be a very different place now. We would not be bankrupt. We might have supported the United Nations to maintain peace. Thousands of people would be alive who are now dead. We would have most of the world with us.

But we do not have that indomitable faith, and so we lock ourselves in impossible situations, suspecting everyone of doing things we don't like--don't understand, and we make no effort to understand. Now most of the world is afraid of us, afraid of what we might do next to destabilize an already unstable world.

It seems, we want our world to hide itself behind ever more clever locks, even though we should know that someone can invent an ever more clever key, because making locks is much too profitable for the few, and the few control who govern us as well as those who tell us what they want us to know.

I hope the Muslim world will hear the little story of the Amish (and Mennonites, and Brethren, and Quakers, and a few others probably) who do not fear because they have faith. They too are this country. As I am sure there are Muslims who do not fear the terror that roams the world because they have unshakable faith..

robert wolff ?? October 2006

Authors Bio:

robert wolff lived on the Big Island, called Hawai'i

his website is wildwolff.com He passed away in late 2015. He was born in 1925, was Dutch, spoke, Dutch, Malay, English and spent time living and getting to know Malaysian Aborigines. He authored numerous books including What it Is To Be Human, Original Wisdom and Rain of Ashes. 

"Original Wisdom is an extraordinary book that every person should read." Rob Kall