Empowerment vs Passivity

This column by David Brin is a must read. It echoes and expands on many of the themes on which I’ve been ranting since 911. What happened on September 11 was not a failure of airline security, though it was a failure of many of the institutions in which we have now (inexplicably, at least to me) placed our trust. What it was truly a failure of is the notion that we aren’t responsible for ourselves, and must let the “professionals” take care of us. Flight 93 dramatically proved that notion wrong.

We’re all in the army now. This is the message that we have to promulgate, through the fog of the media, many of whom, unfortunately, still live in the old paradigm.