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As I drive in my automobile, freshly waxed and shining, down the newly repaved freeway, happy to live in a nation of car lovers, the moment suddenly fades under the shadow of knowing how systematically our Fourth Amendment crumbles, almost daily it seems, lately. Jefferson, Adams, and the likes focused the core of constitutional liberties around the foundation of a man's castle being off limits without criminal warrant. Yet motoring along roads paid by public taxes, policed by officers salaried by taxes, in state after state citizens are routinely submitted to road block searches.
Those in favor of such action argue that it prevents (whatever number) of intoxicated drivers from posing as potential criminally negligent agents of nefarious mayhem and death. Without question, driving impaired is a crime worth fighting against. Just as preventing terrorists from running rough shod anywhere. But sacrificing civil liberties in these pursuits is a classic example of slicing one's nose to punish the face.

A privately owned car is as much one's castle as a house or property. Our Constitution clearly states that the king must have probable cause for agents of the government to search a premises. Passing a Saturday afternoon tooling down the boulevard will never constitute criminal intent. The problem of drunk driving must be attacked in the same manner as ever other social ill found within the nationindividual responsibility.
Two, possibly, three of this country's biggest wars were battles of individual liberty. In essence the country itself began much the same. The blood of revolutionary heroes and WWII warriors surely must curdle in the graves at the notion of what is happening to civil liberties since 9-11. Our FISA courts, by all accounts, sufficiently allowed intelligence to monitor national security threats since its inception more than 30 years ago. Other motorists (particularly with the advent of cellular technology) and public safety officers can police roadways without subjecting citizens to breaching basic rights.
Free, unfettered access to books in a public library is close to sanctimonious for lovers of language and the ideas it can put forth. Yet all of this, and all its inherently oppressive tenets, has next to zero chance of being fixed unless voices are heard above the nearly constant hum of media entertainment (tv, radio, ipod, Hollywood) that occupies the gray matter of so many, particularly younger ones.
Awareness is the first step. Stay awake! Make change happen.

Learn more about this author, Scott Schriewer.
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