More terror

More terror
We may wince but we will not flinch

November 13, 2001

During the last inning of a hotly contested World Series game, the picture suddenly gave way to static. Some people cursed Fox or their cable company; others sat numbly, wondering if New York had just disappeared from the face of the earth.

When the traditional cannon fire began in Cortez before dawn on Veteran’s Day, some people grumbled and turtled under the pillows. Others, at least for a brief moment before they were fully awake, wondered whether that was how a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles might sound.

When Coloradoans saw on the morning news that a plane had fallen from the sky shortly after takeoff from JFK in New York, many of them thought that terrorists, knowing that airline passengers were now alert to hijackings, had developed a new plan. They would have been relieved to learn that a plane carrying 255 people had "just" fallen from the sky by accident.

A few people have died of anthrax, and relatively few others are known to have been exposed. Yet thousands of people are taking antibiotics, and every person in America scrutinizes mail carefully before opening it.

This is our new reality. When the president urges a "return to normal life," he asks us to pretend that the world is a safe place. In truth, it never was, but we had a national illusion of security that we can never regain. That’s what we’ve lost.

That’s how terrorism works. In concrete terms, the death of 5,000 people was not a successful attack on the United States of America. In psychological terms, 19 terrorists have managed to frighten hundreds of millions of people into changing not only the way they act but the way they think, the way they look at the world around them. That’s power.

It’s also a weapon that can be used effectively by people who have little technology. Osama bin Laden doesn’t need nuclear weapons; he just needs to make us believe that he has them. He doesn’t need the ability to down even one more plane; he can drive an entire industry into bankruptcy with threats alone. He can effectively paralyze the whole country by drawing Americans away from their everyday lives and their jobs to stare at their television sets.

That’s the part of the war that we need to learn to fight as individuals. The president can’t order us to fly. An act of Congress can’t keep us from flinching at explosions.

This is what Franklin Roosevelt meant in 1933, when he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He was speaking of the Great Depression; he later learned that we also had to fear German tanks and Japanese suicide bombers, but those forces, too, failed to triumph over the American spirit. Winston Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons in 1941, said, "Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature." That’s what bin Laden has us doing, keeping an anxious finger on our national pulse. Are we still alive today? Are we still OK?

We are, bloody but unbowed, and our greatest strength is being able to show that from the grassroots up rather than from the president down. We may not be able to avoid the thoughts that terrorism has introduced into our minds, but we are strong enough to avoid cowering because of them. We may wince, but we will not flinch.