corrente

A good column from the mainstream LA Times. David Ulin writes:

I spent my winter vacation feeling victimized, terrorized. In other words, I traveled by air. As the Homeland Security alert level rose to orange, the fear level went right up with it — ratcheted by the powers that be, fueled by vague public information, hyped by an apocalypse-loving media. What astonished me was the extent to which I bought into the hysteria, the extent to which I betrayed myself.

Of course, terror is the wild card we live with, the new baseline for reality. We must acknowledge it, prepare as best we can, but to suppose that with enough surveillance and checkpoints we might truly secure ourselves is a pernicious fantasy. If you doubt this, consider Israel. The more we queue up — docile, frightened — the more we let the real terrorists win.

This is, in part, a matter of civic identity. I come down on the side of Benjamin Franklin, who once said, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." Yet even more, it's an issue of how we live every day, of whether we give in or stand up to hysteria. Terror alerts don't make us much safer, they make us more scared. They make us turn our public spaces into no man's lands, where we are always peering over shoulders, staring at one another with suspicion, searching for the next act of devastation even as it unfolds within our hearts.

Danger, after all, is always with us, just below the surface of the everyday. As individuals we can't keep it from occasionally exploding; we can only keep it from taking over our lives. Fear does not protect us, it only generates more fear.

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once.

So why does Bush want to keep us fearful? Why do we never hear "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? Because it serves his political interests to do so.

Think! Is our "situation" now worse than Vietnam? Korea? World War II? World War I? The Civil War? The Revolutionary War? Of course not! In each case far more lives were lost, and the country was in far greater danger. So why does Bush want to keep us fearful? Again, because it serves his political interests.

NOTE: In writing the paragraph above, I had to use the word "situation" because our language has grown so Orwellian that there's no alternative to writing the "war on terror," which simply buys into the lying. Can anyone suggest a better alternative?