Monkeyfist.com
Reason in a Time of Anger
Sunday, 23 September 2001
.....
Out of the barrage of media coverage since 11 September my mind has plucked the reported fact that seven out of ten Americans are in a state of depression. I am definitely among the seven, and I seriously wonder about the remaining three. How, in the face of this horror, could any American not be depressed by the collective fear and rage of a nation coming to terms with the truth of its vulnerability. Our vulnerability has not been exposed by way of the much touted "rogue Missile" but by the ingenious use of the banal, made infinitely more frightening for its familiarity, and the simple ease of its execution.
No ballastic missile defense system could have protected America from the attacks in NYC and DC. Proponents of missile defense admit as much, but then they argue that you can't criticize the proposed system for this failure because it was never intended to defend against such attacks. Well therein lies one of our many problems; while we were busy preparing for the improbable, we were blind to our real vulnerability. What may have seemed plausible to many is now exposed as ridiculously naive.
Debates about whether missile defense can be made to work have been now seem wholly irrelevant. It hardly matters that we can shoot down the imagined missiles of an enemy too impoverished to build them, when those same enemies can live among us and through stealth and ingenuity turn our own airliners into missiles, the deadly threat of which is only now understood: deadly enough to destroy buildings and monuments; deadly enough to destroy people by the thousands; deadly enough to destroy our sense of invulnerability. We may be in time repaired, perhaps restored. We are forever changed.
This isn't supposed to happen to Americans; or so we Americans have been thinking, indignantly, forgetting that we haven't much cared when it has happened to others. We are shocked that such destruction could take place in America, not considering that such tragedy has become commonplace for many people in other, less self-possessed places. We are appalled at the blatant disregard for the lives of ordinary people, forgetting the pain inflicted upon other ordinary people by American-backed terror or, worse still, by our own government's hand in the name of our national interests.
Don't misunderstand my words or question my loyalties. I love America, and I am appalled by this crime against humanity. I only ask for reason in a time of anger. Anger is justified. I am united with my fellow citizens in anger, but mine is not single-minded. I am angry at the enormity of this crime, and I am angry at the disruption of my peace. And I am angry, too, that my government placed us in this danger. Angrier still that, as a people, we cannot see that our "foreign policy" -- our patterned way of relating to the rest of the world -- is one of the causes of the atmospheres of rage and frustration and callousness inducive of terrorism.
Instead of blindfolding ourselves with the flag and giving ourselves and our reason over to the rhetoric of war, we would do better as a people -- to make ourselves safer in the long run -- to examine the policies that led to the shattering of our national security. It is easy to blame a flat, one-dimensional evil, personified by Osama bin Laden; but it's harder to see and to admit that (to reverse a tired cliche) it was necessary that bin Laden exist, and so we created him.
As hateful and as extreme as these attacks were, is it any less extreme or hateful to demand and to accomplish the systematic destruction of Afghanistan as a sop to our anger? Is it any less hateful to harass and abuse and attack and kill people of Islamic faith or Arabic ethnicity to quell our fear and secure our revenge? In the past 11 days, across the U.S., there've been more than 400 acts of violence against Muslims or Arabs -- or those perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be Arab or Muslim. Two of those 400 acts were murders. Does that make you feel better? Safer? More American?
Evil begets and justifies more evil; and through the actions of those Americans responsible for those 400 acts of hate, it's clear that in their hearts the terrorists have already won.
So how should we respond? The attacks were by every definition criminal acts, and they should be treated as such. If, as suspected, Osama bin Laden is determined to be responsible for the attacks, then he should be pursued, captured, and brought to justice. All those who acted in concert with him to commit these acts should be pursued, captured, and brought to justice. I suggest nothing less than justice. I question whether justice requires war, especially the "new", open-ended, unending, war-as-crusade that we're being led into by our leaders.
Such a war will do much to legitimize the terrorist acts, giving these criminal acts the credibility of a disagreement between States. If our goal is justice, it seems better served by treating these terrorist acts as international crimes. If we pursue bin Laden as a foe, if we wage war on Afghanistan because we cannot wage war on bin Laden, we will cause his sympathizers to rally to his support, building rather than destroying his networks. War, especially this war, will cause civilian deaths; and those deaths are too easily justified -- when they can be known by us, given the "unprecedented security" with which Bush and the military promises to wage this war -- by the facile and irrelevant idea that the terrorists did not care about the lives of the thousands of people whom they murdered. To speak thus is to speak with the voice of revenge, not the voice of justice.
Civilian deaths in Afghanistan or in other Arab or Muslim nations will lend further credibility to bin Laden's claim of American imperialism intent on the destruction of Islam, a claim that is underscored by the President's careless talk about crusades. If bin Laden is pursued as a criminal, instead of fought as a foe, the world may well be less interested in helping bin Laden and his forces. If we make a crusade of our response, we play into bin Laden's hands.
You may ask what you can do. You can find antiwar demonstrations in your city and take your family to them. You can oppose anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism when you see it on the streets or spooling off the office fax machine. You can contact your congressional representatives to let them know you oppose a war against Afghanistan. You can resist the mass impulse to give yourself over to your rage. You can reason in a time of anger.
This is Reason in a Time of Anger <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/784>