In the summer of 1988, I studied Russian language and linguistics as part of a study abroad program at the Institut Stal y Splava in Moscow. I don't think any of us -- neither the visiting Americans nor the resident Soviet students at our dormitory -- would have predicted at the time that the Berlin Wall would fall a mere two years later, but Perestroika was in full swing and change was in the air. It was an unprecedented opportunity for Western students to glimpse at life behind the Iron Curtain... shortly before that curtain fell away.

I learned a great deal during my three months in Soviet Russia, but one of the most amazing things was to observe how passively the Soviet citizenry accepted state intrusion into their lives. The Soviet students I dormed with, for example, needed passports to travel within their own country. Imagine that!

As a child, I had grown up along the border between the US and Canada; I had frequently split my summers and weekends between Fort Erie, Ontario and Erie County, New York. My family would cross the Peace Bridge that straddled the border with almost as little fanfare as crossing the Grand Island Bridge nearby. Some spare change to pay for tolls, and a Hi, Howdy-Do to the customs agents on whichever side we were entering. We did not bring passports. Our car was our passport.

"Citizenship?"

"U.S."

"Cleared to go."

I don't want to get to far down the road of romanticizing the past. But by 1988, I'd flown all up and down the East Coast, I'd driven interstate, and I'd bussed interstate, and I'd driven and bussed internationally. If I was driving, I needed my driver's license. I'm pretty sure I didn't need it for the bus. Or the plane. Perhaps I'm misremembering that.

But to fly to Europe, I needed a passport, and to enter Russia, I needed eleven passport photos for the various visas and such that the Soviet Union required of me. This was all understandable -- I was, after all, to be a foreigner abroad, and that's what passports and visas were all about.

But the very idea that one needed a passport to travel *within one's own country* was as foreign to me as, well, as any other consequence of living in a police state. The Soviet Union had a constitution that purported to establish a democratic government, but just try peaceably assembling in Red Square to petition your government for grievances.

From what I observed during those three months, life in the Soviet Union was obviously hard. Crime was low -- one of the benefits of a police state, I suppose -- but morale was lower. The people were genuinely warm and friendly, and very curious about foreigners. They also carried a burden of weary, wary fear. "If I had met you six months ago," a Soviet student named Max once said to me (in Russian), "we wouldn't be talking now. There'd be two men in grey coats following you everywhere you went. It wouldn't do for me to be seen talking with you."

With the advent of September 11, crossing the border between the US and Canada is no longer as casual as it once was. Okay, I understand that. But the federal government is now saying that my state's drivers' licenses (along with ten other states) are not "secure enough", and that the federales won't allow me to take a commercial flight using my drivers license as my ID. By this time next year, it's a near certainty that I'll have to use a passport to fly anywhere within the United States.

Hellooo? Mcfly?!

This is but one little development that nags at the back of my mind. One clue in an orgy of evidence that we are sliding toward more of a police state than I would ever have thought possible within the US.

But while we're more of a police state than would have been imaginable seventeen years ago, are we likely to take this trip to its logical conclusion? Are the liberties we have sacrificed irrevocably lost? As the saying goes: have the terrorists won?

I don't think so. Certainly, we have lost a great deal of our liberties -- liberties we have, as a society, handed over just a little bit more eagerly, in exchange for some phantom sense of security, than I think wise. But this isn't the first time the US citizenry has headed down this road -- starting with the Alien & Sedition Acts during the administration of our second president, John Adams, and seen as recently as the Nixon administration's attempts at making it easier for federal law enforcement to share information with each other.

Those attempts were ultimately repealed, and the current Patriot Act is likely to suffer the same fate. Eventually.

More to the point, however, I see reminders every day that our society has not been *completely* cowed by the threats against our liberty from within and without: every day, I drive by groups protesting the war (or whatever it is) in Iraq. And people protesting the protesters. Every day, I read major newspapers opining against or in favor of various policies and actions by the current administration. Every day, television news shows us both attacks upon and support for our troops and our politicians and our way of life.

Friends of mine who support the current administration view the protesters and the "liberal media" as undermining our society. Friends of mine on the other side of the political spectrum view supporters of the current administration and the "vast right wing conspiracy" in the media as likewise undermining our society.

I disagree on both counts.

The very fact that protesters protest and supporters support and occasionally members from opposing camps swap sides is all to the good. It's annoying, certainly, to see your own position assailed by others. It's annoying to watch the tide ebb, even when you know intellectually that it will once again flow. But as long as the voice of dissent can be heard -- is *allowed* to be heard -- we're doing a far cry better than any system our enemies would seek to impose.

As I drive down the road and find a group protesting their cause of choice, whether I share their views or not, I am glad we still have loyal opposition. As long as those voices can be heard, the terrorists have not won.