For America, a dose of reality By Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe, 9/12/2001 HE UNITED STATES is wailing and wrenching, caught in its most bewildering moment of war. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians, the most ever killed on our shores, died within the space of a few hours by a violent act. But the enemy carried no Union Jack, no Stars and Bars, no Iron Cross, no rising sun, no swastika. It involved no visible army at all. It is the most bewildering moment because we have the world's mightiest army, yet the Pentagon was bombed. It is bewildering because America is the world's richest nation, yet its greatest twin symbols of capitalism no longer stand. It is bewildering because the president says terrorism will not stand, yet he knows not where the enemy stands. It is bewildering because we have fantasized, through our shelves of disaster movies, from "King Kong" to "Independence Day," that America could be attacked by everything from gorillas to aliens, but most of us would always be saved. "Independence Day" has now happened for real, and we are bewildered because there are no spaceships for Will Smith to shoot at. No spaceships are needed when you can simply fly a jetliner. It is bewildering because in a nation so numb to celluloid violence, gun violence, and even genocide abroad, no one can now be detached from the effects of violence. Fifty thousand people work in the World Trade Center. Hundreds more people were in the air when four passenger planes were deliberately crashed. Well within the six degrees of separation, all of us were somehow connected to someone who was in there or up there and prayed that they came out or came down alive. Nearly all of us fly, and there could not be a person in this nation who did not cringe over replays of one of the planes exploding into the World Trade Center. In this modern world, airplanes simultaneously symbolize our faith in technology and the terror of helplessness. We cringe because an unseen roll of the dice could have put any one of us on board those airplanes. Here in Boston, it is sickening to think that the hijackers of the two flights from Logan may have slept comfortably in our midst the night before. America now knows, in the most personal way, to the depths of its civilian vulnerability, that it is part of the world. Obviously, whoever did this must be found and put away forever. That only partially solves the problem. If one recalls, America was originally reluctant to enter what became World War II. Pearl Harbor changed all that. Now America has been forced into the world again, at a probable loss of life worse than Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 7, 1941, 2,400 soldiers and 49 civilians were killed. The question is, what world are we joining? The smoke has not cleared, and our more hawkish leaders are whipping up the winds of revenge. A senator was on CNN railing about the "bastards." Security experts were bellowing about holding fully responsible any nation that has ever given comfort to Osama bin Laden, the most talked about suspect. Since most states in this nation employ the death penalty, the term "fully responsible" is a perilous term. In the Gulf War, the United States killed thousands of Iraqi civilians in "collateral damage." If we did that merely over oil, does that mean we should bomb women and children in, say, Afghanistan? Revenge will be an understandable emotion in the coming days, as the body count and the saber-rattling mount. But it is also eerie that, suddenly, we want help on terrorism at the very time when we have been isolating ourselves from the world stage, from the environment to racism to missile defense. Missile defense would not have prevented the worst peacetime act within the lower 48 states. Whoever attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and our sense of daily trust and freedom, must be found. But America must find itself, too. The targets clearly represented America's global power, a power that is not innocent of arrogance, either militarily or economically. With all the condolence that can be offered, it is incongruent to think that the world's leading exporter of the tools of death and destruction would not someday be visited with an evil in return. Yesterday America learned that its soul could be momentarily leveled, humbled, and reduced to rubble. How we pick ourselves up will determine how long this war will go on. It will depend on how humbly we handle our power, which by definition makes us a target. What we know more clearly than ever is that no matter how much we withdraw, the most terrible evils can still come to us. -- Source: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/255/oped/For_America_a_dose_of_reality+. shtml