Every now and then something comes up in my conversations with trusted friends that demands exploration. Trusted friends are those with whom it’s O.K. to disagree and challenge and to whom it is sometimes fair to admit that they are right and I am biased and too narrowly focused and in need of readjusting my ideas and my arguments. They are the friends who will concede when it becomes clear that their ideas are the ones that are biased and too narrowly focused.

After a discussion with a friend about whether Bradley Manning, the American soldier who gave Wikileaks classified information, should be considered a patriot or a traitor, the conversation turned to definitions of terms like dictatorship and democracy. Although I am not a Greek scholar, I did actually slog through four semesters of Greek once-upon-a-time, so I used that bit of my academic history to try to gain a point in the argument. My friend implied that a democracy is no better than a dictatorship if a person like Manning doesn’t have the right to “expose” what he, as a citizen, considers critical tyrannical policies and actions of his government. I hemmed and hawed at that point in the argument mainly because I didn’t have the facts about Manning’s alleged crimes; and for hours after the discussion with my friend, I wasn’t able to get the problem out of my mind. This writing is premature because I’m doing it before I’ve finished thinking through the issues; but because this is my journal writing for today and I usually post the journal writing on my BLOG, I’m forging ahead as if I know what I’m talking about. If you’ve read this far today, you may want to stop. I may or may not take up the subject again tomorrow.

Just about everybody knows our word democracy (Greek, δημοκρατία) is a combination of two Greek words: demos (δῆμος, which means “people”) and kratos (κράτος, which means “power” or “force”). My friend is no academic slouch, so he pointed out that in Roman times the word dictator (dictat- from the Latin verb dictare) didn’t necessarily have the negative meaning that it has today. Originally a dictator was a person who had sole, usually absolute, power that was conferred, usually in an emergency, by whatever system was accepted as the appropriate system of government. In modern usage, a dictator is someone with total power over a country, usually someone who got the power by force.

So... At what point and in what kinds of activities and expressions is it appropriate for the ruling power structure to censure and imprison an individual person (δῆμοs) to restrict his/her freedom in the effort to safeguard democracy? Is it appropriate for “the government” to take away my tube of toothpaste when I forget and put it in my carry-on luggage at the airport? My answer to that question is “yes.” I am willing for the government to place some limits on my behavior if doing so makes the general population safer. My friend’s answer isn't an unqualified “no,” but it's nonetheless "No."

Of course, this will be a good launching point for another journal writing... a discussion of the confusion resulting from swearing allegiance to contradicting ideas which have inherent in them the possibility for gross hypocrisy. Examples abound of people who don’t seem to be bothered by the contradictions in their ethical, religious and political commitments. It seems not to be a problem for them to want government to forbid two male or two female citizens to marry each other but to insist that “the government” stay out of people’s lives when it comes to matters like regulation of health services, regulation of business, and regulating where and when corporations may drill for oil and what they may not do to polute the environment. The “keep government out of business” folks are also the ones who insisted that corporations are individuals and got the Supreme Court to agree with them.