Goodbye to the Delta Queen

No more riverboat romance, I guess. Not secure enough, or not unionized enough?

I am often reminded, these days, of a passage from Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

Americans crossed the ocean in sailing vessels and primitive steamships, without GPS or depth-sounders and even–throughout most of the great era of immigration–without radios. When their decendents are forbidden from traveling on the Delta Queen, the worship of safety has reached to point of idolatry, and the spirit of human freedom is being contemptuously disregarded.

Balancing freedom and safety is not easy. But it's worth remembering that they are in tension. As C.S. Lewis has reminded us, any noble principle can be turned to evil if misapplied or over-applied.