"...and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country."

In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?

The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable.

Do you read Eugene Robinson? This sentence, to me, says a lot: "There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. ... We accept these risks as the price of liberty." Some people are irrationally afraid, think people who are not like them necessarily are out to get them, which can lead to overcompensation and self-fulfilling prophecies. That's why people are more comfortable, it's human nature really, in keeping close to them types who share a similar background. But fearful people don't make for the greatest leaders or more effective fighters. Particularly if they are compensating for past losses and humiliations. That risk calculation model -- if you're playing for big stakes, one tremendous loss could wipe you out and it doesn't matter how many smaller victories were won before then or how smart you thought the strategy was. Hindsight v. foresight.

There's a great line, related, in Farley Mowat's early autobiography, Born Naked. He's the Canadian naturalist and author, who was afforded a great deal of freedom to tromp about the countryside in his early days. As an adult, he once asked his mother why the parents let him out so early in life to find things out for himself.

"We felt that keeping you in a nice safe cage would leave you with only the vaguest and perhaps the wrongest ideas of what life was really about. Chances have to be took even by the young."

Well said. Sometimes in trying to protect our loved ones, we limit them unnecessarily. Burden them with our past. Fear, loss, risk calculation -- I'm not saying the protective response is not rational necessarily. But at what cost? I think here, Eugene Robinson speaks for quiet masses, not that they're unaware of risks. Not at all.

It's just, you can't safety-proof the world. Who in their right minds would want to? Can you imagine the cost, and who pays? Lots of people have survived hard times; you can't let it beat you down. At some point, you have to get out there with others unlike you, and learn to adapt to survive outside your self-imposed confines. A caged life limits growth. "Chances have to be took even by the young."