Outis

As a child, growing up in the 1980s, I often thought: is right now going to be the moment when the world is annihilated by Global Thermonuclear War?

I would have this thought while walking down the street, while sitting in a classroom, while watching TV.

I would begin the final countdown whenever the local fire department would blast its horn, whenever the sky was blue and the leaves were green and there was no sound at all except for the song of the birds in the trees.

I always imagined the Soviet ICBMs making their way towards Flushing, Queens, tracing clean white arcs through the stratosphere in the same neat diagrammatic fashion as they did in the pages of Time Magazine, the one English language publication my parents received by mail each week.

Mind you, the thought of nuclear war didn’t scare me. It just followed me. Wherever and whenever. Unlike Wordsworth’s, the cloud that floated on high, over hills and vales, in my wandering wondernment was shaped like a mushroom.

I know I was not alone in my thoughts because my peers have confided in me the same lazy-day obsession. And how could we not? Nuclear war, or, at least, its images and possibilities, were all around us.

For fun, we watched movies like Red Dawn, War Games, and The Day After. Even the serious, adult world of news talked about a controversial weapons system nicknamed the Star Wars missile defense shield. I mean, come on, Star Wars!

I don’t know when it was, exactly, that I stopped daydreaming about the Bomb and took up less spectacular but no less morbid thoughts like automobile accidents and random drive-by shootings.

What I do know is that for the last few years I’ve been paying more attention to the sound of sirens and the silence of the midday sky. Because now I have a new willing partner for my morbid musings: the terrorist attack.

I was no longer living in NYC when the Twin Towers were destroyed. I moved to Madrid almost a year after the trains near Atocha were blown apart. Nonetheless, I can’t cross a bridge or sit in a train car without wondering: Now?

Last weekend, while the still unknown murderers were getting ready yesterday’s bombings in London, I was walking through the streets of Oviedo in Asturias, Spain, wondering if the distant sounds of blasts were fireworks, mining blasts or, the “real” thing.

It is said that the terrorists can only win if their victims become afraid. I am not afraid. Very few people I’ve met in Madrid are afraid. None of my friends and family who live in NYC are afraid. As far as I can tell, there’s very few people in London right now who are afraid.

So, who’s afraid? Apparently, many of the people who elected George W. Bush and Company to a second term as President of the United States of America were afraid. Are they less afraid today?

After all, what’s new? There are bad people alive today just as there were yesterday. That we cannot change. What we can change, however, is how we deal with murderers and potential murderers.

Do we respond with fear and fall into the hands of authoritarians, demagogues and cabals? Or, do we respond with transparency, with efficiency, with measured words and precise operations?

I believe the British are about to teach the Americans a thing or two. I hope the Americans are paying attention.

The purpose of terrorism is not only to kill and maim the innocent, it is to put despair and anger in people’s hearts.

It is by its savagery designed to cover all conventional politics in darkness, to overwhelm the dignity of democracy and proper process with the impact of bloodshed and of terror.

The politics we represent will win and will triumph over terrorism. There is no hope in terrorism, nor any future in it worth living. And it is hope that is the alternative to this hatred. – UK Prime Minister Tony Blair

Update (August 27, 2005)

On his personal web site, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair reprints most of a Peggy Noonan editorial in which she advocates on behalf of — well, nothing really — in order to start floating some apocalyptic scenarios that end in martial law:

Imagine they’re planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months–food shortages, fuel shortages.

Let’s make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.

The occasion for this dark projection is the closure of several military bases — closures agreed to by the Pentagon at a time when they’re getting whatever they ask for and more.

Hence, there really is no point to Noonan’s piece — in defense of the general idea of having a military. We’re all in agreement on that count.

Where we differ, is whether we will allow terrorists — those who sew fear to reap political gain — to determine the course of our politics.

I wonder: would the U.K. be OK with helping us out on that front?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Politics, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.