Leadership Quote by Jo Ann Davis

Davis’s line is built like a policy door left conveniently ajar. By opening with “the terrorist attacks upon our country,” she invokes a trauma so large it hardly needs naming; the absence of “9/11” is itself a rhetorical move, allowing the phrase to function as a permanent, reusable trigger. “Changed the way that we live forever” isn’t descriptive so much as atmospheric: it normalizes a new baseline of emergency, the kind that makes exceptional measures feel like common sense.

The pivot is “cruel reminder,” a moral framing that pre-sorts debate. If the lesson is “cruel,” then resistance to the lesson can be painted as naive. And the lesson she offers - “freedom and liberty have a price” - is where the real work happens. “Freedom” and “liberty” are paired as sacred redundancies, making the phrase sound constitutional and unassailable. “Price,” meanwhile, stays artfully vague. It can mean military action abroad, increased surveillance at home, tightened immigration, expanded executive power, curtailed privacy, or simply a more militarized civic mood. Vagueness is the point: it invites agreement without specifying what, exactly, citizens are being asked to surrender or pay.

Coming from a politician in the post-9/11 era, the intent reads as both memorial and mandate. It consoles by dignifying loss, then converts that loss into political capital: a framework where security policies become not choices with tradeoffs, but dues owed for belonging to “our country.” The subtext is simple and durable: if you question the price, you question the freedom.