Reflections on Terrorism

Well, this is going to be the shortest Into the Centre on record. The events in New York City, Washington, D.C. and rural Pennsylvania have almost rendered me speechless. I've been debating sharing my reflections in this week's issue - this is such a multi-layered event, and I really want to say, loud and clear, that some mindless, New Age granola-head response that sounds like "just pray for peace" isn't going to cut it.

The ideological warfare that forms the undercurrent of our world is not one-sided. We all have a problem of values and of good and evil. Because the world is structured on a premise of "us vs. them," (despite Pogo's admonition, "We have found the enemy and they are us.") there will always be brinkmanship. The events of last Tuesday greatly upped the ante. And the military response, dreaded but necessary, (a friend of mine shared Dennis Miller's comment: "Sometimes it's necessary to cull the herd." I concur.) will escalate this situation. Cooler heads will not prevail.

We want to remember that those of us who live in the West, loosely defined, consider our freedom and our desires to supersede that of our "opponents." ("Walk tall and carry a big stick." - T. Roosevelt) And our opponents, loosely defined, are willing to commit suicide to make their point. And of course, everyone thinks God is on his or her side. Poor God. (I mean, last week's horror story was grown Protestants hassling Catholic school-girls. Big, brave people, assaulting kids in the name of God. I want to retch.)

We need to understand that last Tuesday was carefully planned and designed to achieve the greatest shock value. It was as much psychological warfare as it was mass murder. The set-up was such as to cause us to begin to fear - fear going into tall buildings, into planes. As the days progress, we find out that some of the terrorists lived and worked in the USA for maybe 5 years. This too was part of the psychological warfare - we now begin to question our Arab neighbours. We wonder - whom can we trust? And in this paranoia, we are as frozen as a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching train.

The military will do what it always does - demonstrate its overwhelming firepower, and many of us, secretly and not so secretly, will cheer. None of us is that far from our primordial blood lust, and all of us know, or can remember, when war was a noble cause. (Think WWII, and Hitler.) I remember a quote - from George Orwell - who said, "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." When an attack of granola-ism threatens to hit, remember that our freedom to gripe, and to pray, has been won on the point of a bayonet. And say a prayer of thanks for our soldiers and police. I am so proud to be both American and Canadian as I remember who guards my freedom. (I've never been naïve.)

Since the publishing of A Course in Miracles, there's this belief floating around (actually stated in the Course) that there is no evil - that evil is a misunderstanding on the part of the observer. Crap. I stand with Scott Peck (People of the Lie) and declare my conviction that there is clearly evil in the world, and we've just seen it. But before we get too sanctimonious, let's remember that the Viet Nam war was another demonstration of evil, this time perpetrated by the US, and we in the West still have dirty hands. As I said, this is multi-layered, and none of us are virgins.

So, where do we go from here? My prediction is that the markets are going down in a big way, and this was not the last attack on the West. We will stand firm and fight back and the world will be rocked. Maybe this is the time when it will get bad enough that we might actually begin talking. Rethinking how we "are" with each other. Rethinking how "entitlement thinking" and "thinking we are special" has gotten us into this mess. How many times, prior to Tuesday, did you hear, "Stuff like that can't happen over here?" Loss of innocence is a polite way of saying we just grew up by surviving a rape.

We need, as usual, to get over ourselves, in a big way. The writing was on the wall (and in the sand) for decades. We are going to have to pull in our belts and rethink how we live, how we do business, and especially, what is important.

We have some new heroes. The passengers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania decided not to go down quietly, and likely saved the White House. Hundreds of firefighters and police rushed to the World Trade Center and many, many died in its collapse. This urge to help, to stand firm, to fight back against mindless violence is one of the touch-stones of our humanity.

Now, we need to be heroes too, because it's going to get rough. We need to continue reaching out to those who are hurting, grieving. We need to be strong for the rescue crews, who are spending long shifts digging and finding only death. We need to reach out to each other, with words of encouragement and caring, and also with the challenge, "If you knew you were going to die in the next 10 minutes, how pleased would you be with how you've been living your life so far?"

We will move on. We will face whatever is to come. The only question is, how well?