Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Who will deliver us from our Fears? I feel sorry for people living in the Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC.  They are living in fear due to what appears to be at least two men acting to sow terror.  I think the odds are increasing that this is a terrorist act, not the act of a deranged individual.   If I lived in the area, I would think twice about going out to do errands, or sending my kids to school.   Tonight my wife and I were talking about our fears of Russia when we were children.  In my school in Texas, we conducted drills getting under our desks when there was a warning of a nuclear attack.  Also, the city of Austin put up a number of civil defense towers around town, and tested them at 10:00 am on the first day of each month.  If they went off any other time, we were under attack.   In my wife’s town, they sent kids home from school on foot as part of a drill—somehow the prospect of a nuclear attack meant that school buses couldn’t run.   In high school, a number of stories I wrote were centered around fear of nuclear war, and the end of the world, in the style of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach.      The old fear of nuclear war came to mind during the news coverage of the conference in Cuba by surviving participants in the Cuban Missile crisis.  The most interesting thing I heard was a report on NPR about what actually happened in the cabinet meeting on the last day of the crisis.  Contrary to the PR story of a divided cabinet that finally made a deal with Khrushchev to remove missiles from Turkey, the tapes of the meeting now in the public domain show the cabinet secretaries and the military were united in their rejection of the deal and demanded to bomb the sites in Cuba.  It was John F. Kennedy alone who argued to accept the deal, and it was only his conviction that avoided disaster.  Would we be so lucky with our callow president today??   All of us have personal fears.  It is up to each of us to come to terms with death of loved ones, disease, failure, humiliation and loss.  But fear on a social level is different.  During the 1950’s, my wife said she was terrified of the Russians.  In fact, she once told me she used to fear that airplane contrails high overhead were actually Russian bombers.   In Maryland, there is a different fear—a fear of being randomly killed through bad luck or fate.  It is a separating fear—locking people in their homes, making them afraid of collective action.    Both of these types of fear cry out for leadership.  Churchill and FDR were masterful at calming the fears of their nations.  We are suffering more fear than necessary  because of our President’s complete failure to understand the nature of terrorism.   To combat fear of terror, Bush should call on people to come together—to defend our liberty, to act together to protect each other, to reach out to other countries around the world—in short, expressing trust can overcome fear.   But Bush is blinded by his contempt for ordinary Americans.  He is committed to corporate secrecy and control—so his message is “don’t worry, I’ll take care of you”.  Al Qaeda is smart enough to make a mockery of this, as they conceivably are doing in Maryland.    Because of this failure of our leaders, we will need to overcome our fear on our own. 10:02:26 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:30:55 PM.