Held hostage by fear

Progressive Ponderings
Joan Chittister

(Note from Joe Mayer: Joan Chittister writes a weekly column entitled "From Where I Stand." This week's was too good not to circulate further – a shortened version.)

We are a country held hostage by fear. It's difficult to go through an airport these days without doing some serious soul-searching about it. The famous question repeats itself over and over again: Are we better off today than we were five years ago?

In Asia , for instance, I do not need to take off my jacket and jewelry and buckles and cell phones as I go. In Europe there are no body scans and puffers as there are in Albuquerque. In Africa and South America , they do not submit my computer to body scan of its own.

We re-elect politicians to "stay the course." So what is "the course."

Instead of working with moderate governments and the world community, instead of courting public opinion and international support, instead of trying to understand the U.S. image around the world and working to change it, instead of asking why gleeful children danced in the streets when the Twin Towers fell, instead of doing something positive to correct it, we fed right into it. We did the frontier thing and began to kill people ourselves. As in "That'll show 'em who's boss." Except it hasn't.

By defining the attack on the Twin Towers as the declaration of global war, it has made global war a reality. As a result, it provides an excuse for any authoritarian government to call its dissenters "terrorists" and suppress them. So much for the freedom of speech we like to say we're seeding around the world.

By launching high technology weapons against countries whose armies are under-equipped and whose borders are porous, we have managed to reinstitute a nuclear arms race.

So we fight in the dark everywhere, claiming thousands of innocent lives and few "terrorists." We do it against those who claim no flag, no government, no terms of peace, and we may never know if we have managed to defeat them or not.

The government refuses to submit its military behavior to an International War Crimes Tribunal and so, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, admits that its behaviors are in question.

And all of this on account of 19 politically independent, unauthorized fanatics. They provoked from us an all-out irrational response against the wrong people and now the whole world is asked to take sides.

And here, in the United States , paranoia grips the land. The Constitution is being shredded one line at a time. We are facing a decade-long moratorium on social issues, because all our money is going into war against whom we don't know and where we're not sure. In the meantime the richest country in the world cannot have universal medical insurance, day care services, subsidized housing or welfare programs, and the army is where the young go to get an education.

No the world did not change after 9/11. We did. The question is, what else could we possibly have done? Is there any kind of response that would have been more effective than what we did? And if so, why aren't we doing it?

From where I stand, it isn't that 9/11 did not demand a response. It's that the response we made has the smell of inanity (pointless). In fact, we may have done more harm to ourselves as a result of our response to it than any 19 – 19! – terrorists could ever have hoped.