Thirteen Days Out

Flags are back to full staff. Troops are being moved closer to Afghanistan. Options are being discussed.

My mind is going back to December, 1941, after Pearl Harbor. What was life like then, in Kansas City? By November, 1943, I was born, and I received letters from my parents' friends and relatives around the country. My birth was announced in our church bulletin, along with this notice, "Lest we Forget . . ." which listed two servicemen from our congregation and their addresses. It had become a routine item by then, to encourage cards and letters from church members.

Will our lives become routine again like this again someday? The difference is that Pearl Harbor was not a terrorist attack on the contiguous 48 states. It was by a known enemy, and even though we may have overreacted by rounding up all residents in the U.S. with Japanese ancestry, we came to feel safe in our own borders, at least in Kansas City, far from any coast.
Will we ever feel safe again? How many days or weeks or months or years will it take for us to be "terror free" before we feel safe enough?

When we deal with more familiar threats - threats of tornadoes, or threats of getting cancer, or threats of being burglarized when we are away from home, or threats of having an automobile accident - we take reasonable precautions that do not really inconvenience our lives and then take our chances. Some of our relatives have died in automobile wreaks, or even playing high school football, or from industrial accidents. Many have died from cancer or heart disease.

Fewer have died in bad storms or from an act of crime.
We live in a state of "constructive denial" just so we can cope with the here and now and not get immobilized by limitless hypothetical threats out there.

Still, right now, not quite two weeks after that tragic day, we are still semi-immobilized. Long range projects are put on hold. All our commitments are "conditional" even if we don't say so out loud.

If even one more terrorist event occurs before Halloween, or before Thanksgiving, or before Christmas, what will happen to our ability to function? It seems so scary that just a few fanatics, showing just a small degree of coordination, could bring such a huge nation to its knees. Even if our army were twice as large, or our nuclear stockpile were ten times as big, we are vulnerable from this kind of disruption.

Where is the fault in this? Would our pioneer forebears have been so vulnerable to the Indians? Would our Minutemen have been so vulnerable to the Red Coats? Or for that matter, would present day Haiti be as vulnerable as the U.S. Our vulnerability may be the result of our advanced "development" wherein we are so interconnected, so dependent on maximum productivity and full capacity of our transportation systems and our communication systems, etc. We are potential victims of our own complexity, our choice to adopt "just in time delivery" on almost every necessity of life.

1941 was a simpler time, more hands-on. My birth in 1943 was announced to my out-of-town relatives by telegram, sent by my father, paid in cash. Their letters of congratulation were sent by airmail. The church bulletin that announced my birth was printed by mimeograph, and the stencil for the mimeograph was cut on a manual typewriter. Letterpress was used to print the front of church bulletins, and the photo of the church was reproduced with an 85-line screen.
What can we give up that will give us more security? Can we give up imported oil? Can we even discuss it? Why should we have to settle for telegrams and manual typewriters, even handwritten letters, and pay extra for airmail?

Our cold war with Russia for so many years seems so comfortable now, in retrospect. We could just have a nice arms race and as long as we were richer, we were sure to win in the end. As long as we could avoid a nuclear war.

Now, we aren't sure that increasing our FBI and our CIA and our INS and our Special Forces and our Rangers and our Seals tenfold or hundredfold will do the job. Maybe it is really a lot simpler: we just allow us all to have concealed weapons, on the ground or in the air. The terrorists won't know who is armed and who isn't! Let's go back to the days of the Wild West, to Wyatt Earp and Gunsmoke. No problem.