FREEDOM: NOT BLACK OR WHITE.

Byline: JONATHAN DOBRER

JUNETEENTH is an under-appreciated holiday that has been of special significance to black Americans, but should be embraced by all of us. Juneteenth celebrates the freeing of American slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865. Freedom is certainly worth celebrating, and we can all take some measure of comfort that slavery was finally officially abolished in 1865.

President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation became law on January 1, 1863. That is when the slaves were freed. Yet somehow it took 18 months for the news to reach Texas. Even after Lee surrendered, it still took nearly six weeks before the slaves heard of their emancipation.

There is a gap that exists for all of us between what the facts are and when we really "get" the news. Sometimes the issues are trivial, but when it is a question of freedom, time is of the essence.

Liberals and classic conservatives often meet at a kind of libertarian position that agrees that our freedoms must be actively safeguarded, and not just from foreign enemies, but also from well-meaning friends. Fear is not freedom's friend. This is why our freedoms are most under threat from our government when our leaders and we are most afraid. Sometimes fear is a card that is played cynically. But often it is a natural consequence of real dangers.

Sept. 11, 2001, was a terrible tragedy, a wake-up call to the fact that some people want us dead. We were right in fearing that they will come again. We are not paranoid in believing that there are sleeper cells already here and that thousands of people are willing to trade their lives for ours.

We naturally and appropriately shift our attention to the home front and finding cells already here and stopping plots that are aimed at our homeland. This is all understandable and rational. I, as a card-carrying liberal, would have been every bit as determined and focused as former Attorney General John Ashcroft was after 9-11. I would have tried to do anything I deemed necessary to protect my country and to hell with the niceties of civil liberties. I do not expect those charged with defending us to see both sides and be of a liberal nature.

I do expect them to obey the law and to be stayed by other voices that provide both context and a reminder of why we fight and what we wish to protect besides our lives.

I expect our leaders to assert maximum power to protect us. I also expect that I, along with most other Americans, will accept some erosion of our historic freedoms. This has always been true in time of war -- and we have always won our freedoms back.

However, we are in a different kind of war today. Without a state to fight, a territory to conquer, or an enemy who can sign a peace treaty, we cannot know when the emergency has passed. We don't know how long to accept the fear cards that are being dealt out in great numbers.

In the first year post 9-11 we understood a certain amount of racial and ethnic profiling. Maybe we didn't like it, but we accepted it -- like the revocation of habeas corpus by Lincoln. We understood the need to wiretap phones and the Internet, but felt somewhat assured by the need for a warrant -- even if only from a secret court. We got that prisoners of war didn't get all the protections of the American Constitution. We may even have been willing to turn, if not a blind eye, an astigmatic gaze, on "stress questioning" (torture to you and me). Fear made us tolerate actions opposed to our values.

However, today with warrantless wiretaps and the unreliable information coming from Washington and the rushed and unread Patriot Act, it is hard to know which abridgements of freedom and privacy to accept and which to fight. Both absolute surrender to government and absolute resistance seem unreasonable and unsafe. We should be having a nonpartisan conversation across the political spectrum. We should talk about our freedoms before it is too late.

It took 18 months for Texan blacks to learn that they had been freed. The question that haunts me is how long might it take us to learn that we are no longer free?