Fear Not

On this sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, I am thinking about how our country has transformed and the direction we are headed.

FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".

George Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... don't get fooled again."

While many have made fun of W's mashup of an old adage and a song by the Who, it is very telling. For a man that has done more to benefit from and exploit the fears of Americans than anyone could dream, this cyclic ramping up of the fear factor has been a constant theme.

But Americans are increasingly saying to W, "you can't fool us with that again".

The terrorists are a small, highly motivated, and completely insane faction. Wrapping a hatred that makes them desire to kill us in a religious mantle and trying to spread it around the world was something of a hard sell in the days before 9/11. Sure, American policy in the Israeli Palestine conflict was bound to keep a certain portion of the Arab population enraged, but as long as most people could make a decent living and not be assaulted with too many atrocities or outrageous actions (in their minds) by the Americans, they could easily dismiss the terrorist factions.

Not any more. The propaganda of the jihadist that America was something to fear, revile, and resist has been cranked up to a fever pitch by our occupation of Iraq. The recruiting floodgates are open now, despite our intentions.

I resent the fact that every time the administration's influence was slipping, suddenly a new terrorist threat would be trotted out and hyped up. The administration has used these fears to prosecute an unjustified war with little interference by oversight bodies, and has consolidated power including the right to spy on Americans under cover of these fears. For an Administration that is incapable of making any decisions without primarily considering the political impact of them, is it any wonder that the public fears these people being given more power? Given their political track record, does anybody feel that they are incapable of using increased surveillance with no oversight to peep into the private lives of political adversaries?

The terrorists are small in number and usually disunified in action. Their acts seem horrific, but in reality are not that significant. That's right, that is exactly what I said so let me explain. The 9/11 attack was not that significant in itself. Only around 3,000 people died, and we lost the World Trade Center, 4 planes, and damaged the Pentagon. While that is the most successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, that is not a huge attack. If you lost someone personally in the attacks, it was very important and significant, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm talking about the impact to the nation as a whole. What was a big impact was the national perception of what happened and the psychological reaction to it. If we had just had a leader that stood up and repeated FDR's assurances to us, explained that the attack was so much more lucky for the terrorists than they had any right to expect, and so easy to thwart in retrospect, people would have understood that they had little to fear personally.

Our society is not too bright about risk assessment and our media is doing nothing to correct these overblown fears and misconceptions. How many people do you know that were afraid that a person was going to wait under their car and cut their achilles tendon in a mall parking lot based on a stupid urban legend? How many people are so fearful that their children are going to be abducted that they don't allow them to play and have a normal childhood anymore? The average American is horrible at assessing risk and seeks to spend an inordinate amount of time defending against or just worrying about events that are so remotely probable as to be virtually impossible.

So looking back on what the terrorists did to us that day, I would say the worst thing that they did was teach us that we have nothing better to do but live in fear. That is the real tragedy of 9/11.

The sounds of 911

I heard a song by The Calling this week, called I'll Go Wherever You May Go. It was popular back in the summer and fall of 2001.

Someone made a medley of a song (that one or another one) that played for a couple of days during the week after the 9/11 attacks. In the medley, they added actual recorded sounds from the 9/11 attack in the instrumental parts of the song. I remember it had the sound of the towers falling, people screaming, and frantic phone calls. Then it was removed from the air and I've never heard it again.

I tried to figure out what song that was at one time, I wanted to see if I could find it and hear it again. I tried googling it, and I carefully went through the pop charts of that summer to see if I could identify it. I think it may have been a copyright infringement as well as something that they thought was inappropriate - so it was never played again.

On 9/11 I listened to the news on the radio at work. I stayed at my desk and kept working. I called my brother, who was at home and asked him to record what was going on. That was before either tower fell. He recorded Fox News for some reason, and their coverage was very inadequate. They had a fixed camera somewhere in New Jersey, shooting across the water, and they never even zoomed in, just a long shot of smoke pouring off the towers. The commentators didn't even notice when the towers fell, both times, no comments. They just yammered on about nothing.

I missed all the visual things that are burned into everyone's mind from that day, the sight of people jumping, the chaos of the towers falling from up close, the people running in terror, and the dust and smoke. It's weird, I've watched carefully edited documentaries since then, but I feel like I didn't get to see what it was like for most people watching on TV. I don't know why I felt the need to stay at my desk. There was a crappy little TV in the conference room (actually still gets a signal by an antenna) that I could have watched with my coworkers.

We didn't experience the attacks, most of us in America (or the world for that matter), we watched it. If you didn't lose someone, if you weren't there or near, you were just a spectator. I don't think this means you can't appreciate the enormity of it, but it's all second hand. Here's a huge catastrophy and we actually had news cameras everywhere near it.

They scrubbed the experience, sanitized it, edited it. Are they trying to make it more palatable? More acceptable? Nothing can do that. Why not face it, why not be able to face it? If you can't stand to watch a real life catastrophe, how can you expect to understand it? What are we being protected from? Not looking doesn't mean it didn't happen.

That's not my point, though. I can't and shouldn't argue in favor of showing gory details, I don't believe we should always show everything in an unrestricted public forum over and over. But I personally missed part of the experience.

It's sort of like when I was in the Army overseas in Panama for 3 years. I've always referred to it as a cultural gap. I missed 3 years of American culture, like I had some bad binge drinking episode and blacked out. It's pretty much a blank slate. People describe it to me, I can read about it or look it up on Wikipedia, but I didn't experience it. From the start of 1987 to the end of 1989, I wasn't here. All that hair band, the end of the Reagan era, Max Headroom, and anything else that was in the popular culture or on the news is just a classroom lesson for me. It's a strange feeling.

I would like to find out what that song was and to hear it again. I'm not sure why.