Freedom dies in laziness and fear.

Yawning, we surrender without a shot our rights most dear. Quivering, we let a president take the power of a king.

We have given over our right to habeas corpus, guaranteed in our Constitution, to a single person, to any flake, fluke or fraud who might stumble or steal his way into the presidency.

Upon the whim of that office, any foreigner or citizen may be declared an enemy combatant. This power is the foundation of a police state. With that designation, we lose our right to habeas corpus, which requires that the accused be brought before a court where the legality of detention must be decided.

Under the Military Commissions Act, the military may arrest us and hold us indefinitely upon the word of the commander-in-chief or, as he has called himself, The Decider, the title Il Duce (the leader) having already been taken.

We fought for independence to get away from such a despot. We wrote the right of habeas corpus into our Constitution. Without it, our other freedoms mean nothing.

If you exercise your freedom of speech by criticizing the government and are branded an enemy combatant, seized and whisked away, who can argue? You may not be brought to court. You may hear no charges. You may make no defense.

The condition necessary for designation as enemy combatant is that the nation be in armed conflict. The president has declared us in perpetual armed conflict in his war on terror, so that condition is always met. Further, he has the power to declare a state of emergency upon his sole judgment, of which we may rightly be suspect.

In his mind, Americans whom he has called vigilantes and unpatriotic may morph into enemies of the state: enemy combatants. Who will stop him? A Congress that gave him the power?

When opposition becomes enmity, none of us is safe.

Perhaps you trust our leaders to suspend habeas corpus for foreigners only. If so, can you name a power given to government that it did not exercise, if not abuse?

Perhaps you believe that if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear. You must be thinking of the old America, the one where you need not fear disappearing without a trace or charge, perhaps even by accident or anonymous accusation.

Even if you have nothing to fear, absence of fear is not freedom, certainly not the freedom America celebrates. Americans defend the freedoms of one another. The civil rights marches of the 1960s included blacks and whites, arm-in-arm, exercising at great risk their rights to assemble and to speak guaranteed in our Constitution, as habeas corpus was.

If out of laziness or fear we will not do that, then we allow the freedoms of others to perish. In such a country, how long till ours goes, too?

We do not out of charity defend others' freedoms. We do it to protect our own.

Too many Americans would trade freedom for safety.

Politicians feed upon them. They manipulate the public with "sky-is-falling" crises from which only they can save us. The threat of assassins. An energy crisis. A global warming hysteria.

They plunder the treasury, collect lucrative speaking fees, land fat-cat lobbyist jobs and sign book and movie deals with absurd advances that smell like payoffs.

They instill fear and promise safety in their quests for power, wealth and fame.

The patriots who won our independence did not trade liberty for safety. They did the opposite.

Many died for our rights, including habeas corpus. They would demand its restoration. With vigilance and courage, we must do the same.

Phil Lucas is executive editor of The News Herald in Panama City, Fla. Contact him at [email protected]. To find out more about Lucas and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.