Fear Itself

I remember having just left for work that Tuesday morning at around 6:45, and was half-listening to some report about a plane flying into the World Trade Center, and then. while making the left turn onto Escondido Avenue, hearing Bill Handel on KFI announce, in an unusually serious and grave tone, that a plane had just hit the Pentagon. An hour later I watched as the buildings tumbled to the ground.

In the days following the terrorists attacks of September 11 we were met with an overwhelming barrage of words and pictures, of sound and fury, that struck at the tightly wound nerve that binds the national conscience and that, sadly, continues to put an emotional stranglehold on the collective will to reason. What I remember most about that day is not just the fear, anxiety, hatred, and wreckless talk of vengeance, but the few voices who had the courage to ask why someone would do this to us.

I remember standing outside my classroom talking to a colleague, who was quick to remind me that world events don’t unfold in a political vacuum, and that men who could methodically conceive and execute such a catastrophic plan should not be dismissed as “madmen”, “lunatics”, or least of all, “cowards”. Perhaps there was some cause for such an extreme action that was worth discussion and examination.

I agreed with him, but advised him to keep his mouth shut, as that was the last thing that anyone would want to hear on a day such as this. How chilling then, that in a few days Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer would be advising the press, and by extension, everyone to “be careful what you say”. Comedian Bill Maher had the nerve to state his opinion on national television and was subsequently fired for doing so; Susan Sontag wrote a sober five-hundred word essay in the New Yorker and was vilified across the spectrum.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that those who continually spout of our “freedom” and our “values” are usually the first to try to take one away and violate the spirit of the other; and how willing the people are to let them get away with it.

Skyscrapers can be rebuilt and life will go on for the families of the victims, but the decietful betrayal of the people by a secretive, and ever more powerful government is the most dangerous legacy of 9/11. Fear the terrorist, perhaps, but don’t take your eye off of those who claim to keep you “safe”. They are the ones that scare the hell out of me.