Reflections in the Aftermath of Terror
[This was originally a Facebook status update of mine.]
Am finding myself at a loss for words in the wake of yesterday's events. I am already thorougly disgusted with all the speculation about who might have been responsible, by media pundits, as well as the general public, from across the political spectrum. New York Republican Congressman (and former IRA gun runner and overall pig of human being) Peter King was on the news whipping up the anti-Muslim hysteria, solemnly intoning that the bombings had "all the earmarks of Al Qaeda." The trouble with a statement like that is that terrorist acts, irrespective of who or what group happens to be behind them, ALL look like that more or less. I was likewise, and equally, appalled by pundits and others from the left/progressive end of the spectrum rushing in to declare yesterday to have been the work of some violent right wing fringe group. Either one of those is certainly among the possible explanations. Then again, it might just be some deranged, Unabomber type. We just don't know, and thus far don't have enough information to even begin to make an intelligent guess. So all that speculation serves no good purpose whatsoever.
I do worry a great deal, though, how we, as a nation, will deal with and respond to the events of yesterday. The fact is, our track record for handling things in a constructive and healing manner in the aftermath of things like this is abysmal. The raw emotion we feel, as a nation, when something like this happens is all perfectly healthy and natural. So is the transformation of our emotions we experience, as our sorrow begins to morph into anger and then on into blind rage. We have tended, as a society, to allow those raw emotions drive our response to events like this. After the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, that kind of blind rage led an entire nation to see absolutely nothing wrong with rounding up hundreds of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent. As a nation we didn't blink an eye as these citizens, many of whose families had been living here, as Americans, for several generations, were stripped of their property and livelihoods, and whole families shipped to remote, isolated internment camps based on not a scintilla of evidence that they were in any way involved with the Japanese government or were in any way disloyal to the U.S.
LIkewise after 9/11, most of the country thought nothing at all of the fact that Muslim Americans (particularly those of Middle Eastern descent) were being widely harrassed, and in some cases even detained for long periods without charge, for no other reason than that they happened to be Muslims. That collective, blind rage was then seized upon by an opportunistic administration as it led the nation into a war of aggression againt a country which had not attacked us and had nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11 (and which turned out to be an unqualified moral disaster and economic debacle for us). No matter, they played on that collective rage shamelessly as they proceeded to build a fraudulent case for carrying out their pre-planned war.
It was the toxic mixture of that sense of rage with an overriding sense of fear that caused the vast majority of us to stand complacently by while politicians passed laws that effectively eliminated some of our most cherished Constitutional freedoms and protections, and as our cities were effectively transformed into police states. Most of us bought into it because we desperately want to believe that there is some perfect combination of surveillance technology, random, intrusive searches and aggressive policing that will be able to shield us from such acts in the future. But the hard fact of the matter -- a fact we desperately need to come to grips with -- is that there is NO such combination that can or will protect us from someone who is truly determined to do us harm. There's a reason why the phrase "public safety" appears nowhere in the Constitution: our founders understood clearly that the world is a dangerous place. They knew that to live in a society where there is (relative) freedom of movement means to live in a society where there is a (relatively) higher risk that someone intent on causing harm to others may, on occasion, succeed.
I dearly hope that this time around, before we start persecuting yet another ethnic minority and before allowing our fears to demand ever more numerous and intrusive measures and policies in the name of "keeping us safe," we can instead begin to carefully contemplate what conditions might have given rise to a person or group feeling as if terrorism was their best chance of being heard (whoever that individual or group might be). And I also hope more of us, this time, will remember that terrorism is still a very rare occurrence here, and that the likelihood of any particular individual dying in a terrorist incident is far, far down the scale from being struck by lightening. That's what I hope for. But I gotta tell you, I'm not terribly optimistic about it actually working out that way.
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