though it were some big insight into the book?

"hey proles; the liberal l'engle agrees with conservatives: security is bad for y'all."

"This sick longing for security is a dangerous thing...as insidious as the strontium 90 from our nuclear explosions...."

http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/doc-cloud-embedder/?sidebar=1#1881486-a-wrinkle-in-time-excerpt


that's a bit incoherent...

The Security State is can be a creature of either the nominal left or the nominal right.

"security" is an insidious word with a meaning that oozes.

"security state" has connotations different from "social security" for example.

Depending on what side of the aisle you're on.

The problem is, that if you're into "homeland security" and "security from being hurt" you wind up in a police state. The government has to have broad, far-reaching powers to make sure that all threats are countered. In reducing risks, they reduce liberties.

If you're into economic security, you also wind up with a government with broad, far-reaching powers to make sure that all economic threats are countered and that equality is fairly well ensured. Make too much? Don't report everything? Parts of the economy aren't functioning "properly", however inefficient, backwards, or just immature? In reducing risks, they reduce liberties.

It's not by accident these are the two poles that tend to have "political spectra" built around them. Are you an economic liberal or conservative? A social conservative or liberal? Both or neither?

To ensure a thorough-going economic security, though, a state usually has to have a fairly strong central security apparatus. One could argue (wrongly, I think) that the USSR started off with economic security as its goal and required increasing state security both for monitoring and trying to ensure economic equality as well as to fight back against those who really didn't want that level of economic flattening, esp. during really difficult economic times.

The truly restrictive state is one that can abide neither lapse in "security" for its people. The extreme at the other end is libertarianism. The anarchic state insists on absolute freedom in both regards (and tends to quickly lapse into a security state).

People that want an extreme typically only want extremes for as long as the extremes are unattainable and their views are, therefore, nothing more than a pull or tug in those directions. Some people like the extremes because they figure it gives their group power, and they're really into bullying, or because they can't accept that the historical pattern isn't just a possibility but an entailment.

while the police state is being built up further, both at home and abroad.

they aren't coterminous. in either direction.

Edited to add--

This is a classic example of a psychological phenomenon called "priming." I guess it kind of shows where my head is at these days that I would leap to that specific meaning of the word "security."

whichever, that the wsj was who printed it is telling in itself

Thanks for sharing this here.

The only one of hers I've read is called A Ring of Endless Light. About a girl and her dying grandfather. Very memorable & beautifully written.