Security Cameras For Sale

In today’s political climate, Homeland Security issues are hot. Everyone’s steamed about terrorism, civil liberties and “the pursuit of happiness” these days. In the Homeland Security Act of 2002, President George W. Bush formed the US Department of Homeland Security, and like what CO2 levels have done for global warming, it has done to social liberals, run their temperatures high.

Like global warming, however, issues of Homeland Security aren’t new. In fact, the first known usage of “national security” as a term was in the Clark Memorandum of 1928, which dealt with America and its Latin American neighbors. Before that, the Roosevelt Corollary, in 1904, attempted to give America the right to police the entire Western Hemisphere under the guise of paternal interest and self-preservation. And it was the Monroe Doctrine, going back even further to 1823, that JFK sited as the reason for the embargo on Cuba and our “defensive” acts towards the Communist country.

Our long history of Homeland Security doesn’t necessarily make the issues any easier to handle. There are real threats out there in the big bad not-American world. We’ve pissed a lot of people off in the last hundred years or so. Honestly, I’m surprised that it was the fundamentalist wacko Muslims that hit us so hard first. Knowing what I know now about our international politics of the 1970’s, I would have expected a bigger blow from Chile or one of the other South American countries that we manipulated in the late years of the Cold War, but no.