To take part in a meeting this fall, I went to the Executive Office of Elder Affairs in Boston. This agency is located in a state office building on Beacon Hill, a block or two from the State House.

On entering the building, I was confronted with a security apparatus that featured a moving conveyor belt and a passageway for screening weapons. Dutifully I placed my jacket on the belt along with my outer coat.

After I walked through the frame and set off beeping, armed guards equipped with handheld devices for detecting dangerous items in clothing surveyed my body seeking the reason. After emptying my pockets of loose change and keys, I was cleared to enter.

You know this routine by now. Maybe you even feel comfortable with it. I do not, nor do I wish ever to accept it as normal. To me, this procedure, however widespread, comes as an infringement of civil liberties, something I do not want to forget.

Though it may seem unrealistic on my part, I also question whether much of what is demanded by so-called security is actually necessary. The chances of a terrorist attack on a building like the one I visited are extremely low. But chances that we citizens will be discomfited by being frisked before entering a structure that ultimately belongs to us –  –  these chances approach 100 percent.

My main point here is the importance of recalling what we have lost. To young people, this way of living our lives in public will have come to seem normal. Having remembered nothing else, they will take as an expected part of civic life the presence of security devices and procedures all around us. One service my age peers and I can offer is to recall an America where this kind of militarization was regarded as neither necessary nor desirable.

At the risk of sounding paranoid, I confess feeling wary of government using security as a pretext for exercising control over citizens. Given the widespread use of surveillance techniques and other tools of repression directed toward us, it is appropriate to be skeptical of the appeals by federal officials for unquestioning trust.

This applies especially to parts of the Patriot Act, now before Congress for renewal. With precious little debate until recently, some of our legislators have stood prepared, not only to extend the current law, but to add provisions that would further erode civil liberties.

Among the requirements in force over the last four years, one gives the FBI authority to rifle through the records of private citizens without a judge’s approval. An especially outrageous part of this provision forbids the agency asked to hand over the records from even telling the person who owns the documents (though that person’s lawyer may be told.)

This so-called gag rule applies to libraries and doctors’ offices, for example. Is this the way we choose to live now, or is Congress pushing through legislation that trades away our liberties for a mess of pottage in the form of dubiously valuable information?

Again, people who have had long experience of our national community will remember when we lived removed from an atmosphere of fear and overreaction. Yes, the terrorists deserve blame, and, yes, they too possess new and subtle means of attack; but, too often, we allow them to defeat us by cutting back on our own freedoms.

Americans now growing up may also come to think it normal that the president seized power to tap messages of our own citizens without recourse to the courts. They may also judge it to be standard operating procedure to hold prisoners for years while denying them access to a trial. Of course, the president has the right to take such action, they may think, since these procedures have become so familiar.

My juniors may not be shocked by hearing the sitting vice-president fiercely defend an alleged right of the executive arm of government to approve the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Again, repetition may have made torture seem a normal practice for the United States to use. In this instance, fortunately, Congress finally rose up against the executive branch, forcing it to forbid its intelligence and military agencies from using this practice.

The older generations can perform an important service for our youth by alerting them to the ways in which this country has changed. Governmental actions, attitudes, and values looked upon as normal now were not always so regarded. I hope to see the day when our national government champions the freedoms that made America unique in world history.

Of course, I am not suggesting that all the old ways of doing things could or should be reinstituted. We will not again take our seats on airplanes without having to show identification, as I remember doing.

But we do well to remember when the norm in this country was jealously guarding our civil liberties and careful oversight of presidential prerogatives.

Richard Griffin