20010911: Scattered memories

[mdlbear]

I'm afraid this is going to ramble. I'll come back and cut-tag it before I post it, if I have any sense.

I lived a short train-ride from New York before the towers went up; I remember when they razed a couple of blocks of good surplus joints along Cortlandt street. I never went back, and eventually moved away; the towers were just an occasional glimpse in the distance.

Five years ago, I remember waking up to the news on the clock radio; glancing at the TV as I made coffee and breakfast, I watched the second plane smash into the South tower. I remember the growing realization that this must have been deliberate, and not a freakish accident. I remember thinking that it would be a perfect excuse for a right-wing power grab.

I remember watching CNN on the big TV in the conference room. Listening as Bush called for a crusade (that might have been later in the evening, now that I think back on it -- the chronology runs together a little). Talking to co-workers in the break room; trying to find words to calm a distressed young researcher whose native Germany had never known war in her lifetime. Hearing people -- intelligent people -- talk of "a new kind of war". Listened and read over the next few days as the word "criminal" faded from the nation's vocabulary.

I knew then that our nation's leaders would not refrain from taking the easy road to power: plunging the nation into a shadow-war against not a country but a tactic, destroying what was left of the Bill of Rights with the poor excuse of "protecting" us. Wondered what they knew and when they knew it; wondered whether perhaps the attack had been more violent than they expected, but that they had been expecting it. The truth will probably not be known in my lifetime.

There was a moment when we could have turned aside -- devoted our energy to solidifying our gains in Afghanistan, to spreading good will and largesse in the region, to hunting down the terrorist leaders and putting them on trial for all the world to see how fairly we could deal with even the most heinous and misguided criminals. Instead, we invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, shipped suspected terrorists off to Guantanamo and to even more secret places, and wrote secret memos defining "torture" as whatever methods we didn't feel like using at the time.

It's easy to win a re-election when your country is at war; it's easy to see why Bush had to invade Iraq. Of course, it meant that we had no sabers left to rattle at Iran's growing nuclear capability, but...

I wrote a page of essays and a poem a week or two after 9-11 -- I look back at it five years later and see many places where I was, perhaps, more prescient than I wanted to be. Or maybe it was just stating the obvious. I'll close as I did then, with this little essay entitled

Fear

I do not fear for my country. My country is strong, resilient. It was built by immigrants who bravely journeyed here to wrest a living from an unforgiving land -- and by the natives who fought them off. We waged a bloody civil war that would have blown a lesser nation into smithereens -- our union is the stronger for it. We may seem soft and ineffective, and divided against ourselves, and indeed we are soft, ineffective, and divided as long as we have no common foe on whom to concentrate our fury and our fear.

No, I do not fear for my country. I fear what we can do. I fear that we might lash out, like some huge wounded animal, flailing our claws at anything that comes near. I fear that we might strike blindly, crudely, hastily, at the first plausible target that presents itself. I fear, above all, that we might not be able to stop ourselves -- that the wounded beast might continue raging over the world, trampling innocent victims long after the homes of those who sheltered the guilty have been reduced to rubble. I fear that we might go to such lengths as to sow the seeds of yet another band of warriors fueled by hatred against us.

I do not fear for my fellow citizens. We come together in times of crisis, neighbor helping neighbor, volunteers working to exhaustion; people who in easier times would pass on the street without a glance now greet one another as friends. Perhaps we always were, and never knew it. On my weekly walk by Los Gatos Creek I said ``good morning'' to a man I've walked past perhaps a hundred times. Seeing me on my way back he remarked on the weather; we had a pleasant talk. I like our new-found sense of community, but I fear it a little. The line between a band of brothers and an angry mob is sometimes a little too thin, and our history holds not only search parties and barn raisings but lynch mobs and church bombings.

But most of all, I fear our leaders. Our president calls for a ``crusade'' -- a ``holy war,'' yet! I've heard that rhetoric before, and I fear it no less from Bush than from bin Laden. Our congressmen call for restrictions on encryption, not knowing that only strong encryption stands between the Internet and its total destruction, not caring that the web of terrorist cells communicated by word of mouth and hand-carried notes. They call for us to give up some of our privacy and freedom to assure our safety. But when the danger has passed, I fear that more of our privacy and freedom will have vanished than we would ever have allowed a foreign oppressor to take by force. Among over five hundred politicians in congress, only a single voice was raised to object to the resolution authorizing the use of military force -- in whatever measure our leaders may deem necessary, against an enemy they have yet to identify. And when the CIA comes demanding permission to recruit terrorists as spies, I doubt that even a single voice will be raised to ask who trained our current foes, and who will be training their inevitable replacements.

I do not fear for my country; I fear what my country can become. I fear that in the rest of the world my country will be, not loved or respected, but hated and feared. At home I fear for the freedom, the sense of community, the gloriously chaotic diversity that make this country great, and strong, and resilient. I fear that our country may win its war, and lose its soul.

Permission to quote is hereby granted; just provide a link back here or to http://theStarport.com/2001/0911.html.

I need to get some sleep. I'm not going to wish you all "pleasant dreams", but I'd kind of like for the nightmare to stop. I'd like to wake up some bright, clear morning in the near future and have my country back.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I'd like to wake up some bright, clear morning in the near future and have my country back.

That's gonna take a lot of work. But as long as there is hope, I'm up for it...