Nothing to Hide: Twenty-five years ago a stagehand handed me a line. I'm still turning it over.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. — Benjamin Franklin, 1755

The autumn after the towers came down, I was playing a Broadway show eight times a week. It was not an easy season to be a swarthy man with a beard who liked to wear ethnic-looking hats. The city was raw and jumpy in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone who wasn’t standing in it. People looked at each other differently. I got looked at differently. Even by my friends.

In the pit and backstage, my non-musician company was the Local 1 stagehands. Musicians and stagehands don’t usually mix — the stagehands tend to regard us with a scorn I never fully understood. My working theory was that some of them hadn’t been good enough for the high school band, or that their girlfriend had once found the drummer more interesting than they were. Those are the kind of wounds a man carries for life.

But I had a side hustle back then teaching martial arts — Boxing, Muay Thai, Kali — and on matinee days I’d schedule sessions between shows, so I usually had my gear with me. For reasons best explained by so-called alpha-male psychology, this bought me a strange credibility with the Local 1 guys. I wasn’t just some pussy musician. I was a guy who hit things and got hit. That, it turned out, was a passport.

So we were cordial. And being cordial, I learned fast that we lived on opposite ends of the political map.

One afternoon between shows our talk turned to Homeland Security, the TSA, the whole apparatus being assembled in real time around us. I said what I believed then and believe now — that most of it was pretext, that fear was being used to pry open doors to our privacy that would never close again.

One of my stagehand friends gave me the line. You know the line. Everyone knows the line.

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.”

I asked him if he’d ever read the Fourth Amendment.

What surprised me then — and still surprises me twenty-five years later — is how fast the people who love to talk the loudest about the Constitution will flush it the moment they get scared. The same men who’ll tell you the Founders were geniuses, who quote the Second Amendment chapter and verse, who wear their rugged individualism like a leather jacket — those same men, frightened, will hand you their liberty across the bar and thank you for taking it. They’d never say it that way. They’d never admit that’s what they were doing. But that’s what it was.

I’m not picking on my Local 1 friends. I loved those guys. Salt of the earth, most of them. But I’m pointing at something I’ve watched play out in too many places, over too many decades, to keep calling it a coincidence. When a pattern repeats that reliably, it isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Here’s the thing about the tough-guy archetype — the rugged individualist, the don’t-tread-on-me American. Often it’s a costume. Underneath the Captain America suit is a man afraid of nearly everything he doesn’t recognize: the guy in the wrong hat, the wrong skin, the wrong prayer, the wrong language on the subway. The swagger isn’t the opposite of the fear. The swagger is what the fear wears in public.

And fear, dressed up like that, always needs a border. It needs a club with a door and a bouncer. It needs the category of “real Americans” — which is never actually about a passport or a birth certificate or an oath. It’s about resemblance. The real American turns out to be whoever looks and sounds and prays like the person doing the deciding. Nobody writes the membership rules down, because the moment you wrote them down you’d see them for what they are.

In the autumn of 2001, most people were genuinely, reasonably afraid. That fear was real and I won’t mock it. But fear is the most useful raw material a state ever gets handed, and this batch was not wasted. What got built on top of it — the watchlists, the warrantless collection, the normalization of the search — we are still living inside. We took the ceiling off surveillance and never put it back.

And almost nobody was allowed to ask the one question that mattered: why? Why us. The answer came down complete and sealed — they hate us for our freedom — and most people took it the way you take communion, without chewing.

But here is what you find the moment you stop reading only the sports section of the NY Post: nearly every attack on this country, at home or at an embassy abroad, has been a response to something we did first. Not a justification — a cause. Those are different words, and grown-ups can hold both at once. The CIA has a term for it. They call it blowback, and they didn’t coin it in protest; they coined it as tradecraft, because they understood that consequences travel. Iran in ‘53. The fighters we armed in Afghanistan and later met again under a different name. The bases, the sanctions, the propped-up kings, the kill lists. You can find all of it in the public record, written down by the people who did it. It isn’t hidden. It just isn’t in the section most people read.

When I had that conversation in the pit, the shoe was on a particular foot. The suspicion pointed at men who looked like me — the beard, the hat, the wrong vowels in a surname. Shoes off, step aside, answer the questions. Humiliating and wrong, and still, in hindsight, the friendly version.

I’ve watched the machine mature. This past year the pretext got a name: a presidential memo on domestic terrorism and organized political violence whose working definition of extremism reportedly stretches to cover anti-capitalism and the wrong opinions on race, migration, and gender — roomy enough to hold whoever happens to be inconvenient this week. And consider who holds the levers. The sprawling security state that 9/11 built is now run by a man whose résumé is a plumbing empire and a short stint as a paid cage fighter. Building that company from nothing is a real American success story — but not one hour of it was spent in intelligence, in law enforcement, in anything resembling his new job. Beside him stands a senior White House adviser who has never in his life won an election, announcing that he is hunting a fifth column.

I keep coming back to their temperament, because temperament is important when you hand a man that much power. When the plumber-turned-Secretary was still a senator and a labor union leader bested him with facts in a hearing, his answer was to take off his wedding ring — he admitted afterward he was thinking he’d break his hand on the man’s face — and challenge him to a fist fight on the Senate floor, until the committee chairman had to stop the proceedings and remind him he was a United States senator. The adviser’s version is the televised tirade, the shouted diatribe the moment he meets informed, rational pushback. I’ve spent forty-seven years in real fighting arenas, and I can tell you with some authority: a man who reaches for his fists or his loud voice the instant he’s out-argued is not showing you strength. He is showing you the very thing the swagger was built to hide.

And here’s the part that should stop you cold, because it’s the pit conversation come to term. That same adviser has explained that one hallmark of the people he’s hunting is their pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties. Read it twice. The appeal to your rights is now offered as evidence against you. In this telling the Fourth Amendment isn’t a shield — it’s the disguise. My stagehand’s line got promoted: from a bar-stool opinion to the operating logic of a federal apparatus. And it no longer stops at taking your shoes off at the airport.

That, in the end, is the thing I keep circling back to. Not the surveillance itself — the surrender. How readily a free people will swallow an official story whole, hook and line and sinker, and never once turn it over to ask the two questions any curious child asks: Is it true? Is that the whole story?

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

I’ve reflected on that line for twenty-five years, and I’ve come to believe it’s exactly backwards. The one with nothing to hide is not the citizen. It’s the state that wants to watch him. The party that owes us transparency is the one looking down, not the one looking up.

My friend and I never settled it. We had a show to play. We picked up our instruments, or our wrenches, and went back to work on opposite sides of a question the country still hasn’t answered — except the country is answering it now, and not in the direction I’d hoped.

I never did find out whether he read the Fourth Amendment.

I hope he did. I hope he’s reading it now.

Barry Danielian is a licensed acupuncturist (L.Ac.) and a board-certified herbalist. Currently a doctoral candidate at Daoist Traditions College of Chinese Medical Arts, where he studies within the Jade Purity lineage of renowned Master Jeffrey Yuen. He has, for 40 years been one of the most in-demand trumpet players in NYC, and longtime member of the E Street Horns. He writes at the intersection of music, classical Chinese medicine, martial arts and spirituality. Bridging ancient wisdom with modern life.