[In a series for Memorial Day, Contratimes prints this column written a few days after 9/11 and published in a New Hampshire newspaper. It is offered here as a reminder of what it is we ignore, in part, to our own peril.]
©Bill Gnade 2005
Tragedy always sparks a series of ‘what-ifs’: What if we had only done this, or they had only done that? Such second-guessing is inevitable; natural; even responsible.
The recent attacks on our country’s security have produced a myriad of what-ifs, but the most obvious is the what-if regarding our government’s intelligence agencies: What if the federal government could’ve prevented these bombings?
To be sure, there are those who have wondered aloud how the most well-funded intelligence-gathering network in the world could have missed such an apparently obvious threat. That’s a good question. But it is not the only question, or even the primary.
But before I offer what I think is the primary question, it is important to know what it is that threatened America on September 11, 2001. What is our enemy? Who is it?
Our enemy is not really Osama bin Laden, or rogue nations. Our enemy is domestic, and it is two-fold. Our first enemy is our freedom; and our second is security.
How freedom is our enemy is easy to explain: Osama bin Laden could not have done what he did (if he did do it) without the freedoms with which we provided him. It is not overstatement: it was freedom that provided both the infrastructure and superstructure for the success of the attacks against that very freedom.
What happened on September 11? Nothing more than a demonstration of what bad people can do with the good freedoms we live with everyday. It was our relatively free borders, our easy access to information (including architectural, aviation and avionic data), our flight instruction schools, our lightly secured airports and airplanes, our generally free air space that were turned to evil purposes. And it was also our trust in the goodness of humans living in agreement, under law and grace, that were disdained, and turned against us.
Osama bin Laden could not have unfurled his hatred in a Soviet Gulag; his efforts would have been futile in the oppression of Albania of old, or North Korea, or in Alcatraz. For it is freedom, and the wealth of free peoples, that permitted bin Laden to rebuke that freedom with a bomb; his attack on freedom merely affirms the freedom which enables him to attack.
Thus, freedom by nature is and must be a risk.
Our second enemy is this: our desire for security in response to the potential abuse of freedom. It is the kneejerk reaction of removing our freedoms, the ones that made this attack possible (and those freedoms are many), of creating a spiritual Gulag, an Alcatraz of the soul, merely to feel secure. For to remove the possibility of threat is to lock oneself up in a bunker, a bunker for the mind. A world in which there is no way to commit wrong, is similar to a world where there is no way to commit right: they are both forms of imprisonment.
With this said, one must ask whether the government can predict threats when those threats don’t come from outside, but from within. It is not enough to say that we are at war with terrorism, and that we will mete out justice on those who harbor terrorists. For since 1776 this country has been at war with terrorism, and one of the countries that has harbored terrorists is the United States, a fact we learned powerfully on September 11.
But here’s the primary question. It is not where did our intelligence agencies go in the country’s hour of need. Rather it is this: Why do so few Americans love their neighbors?
Lest we forget, the majority of the terrorists of September 11 were in fact our neighbors.
Remember other tragedies, other horrors? Remember our reaction to Jeffrey Dahlmer, the cannibal/murderer with corpses in his apartment? Did we not all ask: Where were his neighbors? Remember Timothy McVeigh: Did we not all ask, how could his friends and family not know? What of the mother who kills her own children while dad is at work? Don’t we all ask: How come dad didn’t see the signs?
If there is anything approaching a rebuke in all this it is the following: that Americans, myself included, are so absorbed in themselves they don’t see signs of the angel of death in their neighbors’ yards. Some of us not only don’t know our neighbors, we don’t even know our own families. So when one of our neighbors or children shoots up a school yard, or blows up a building, we might want to ask, where were we?
Of course, I am not advocating spying on our neighbors, but loving them. Love implies being involved, paying attention. And if I must report suspicious behavior, or put myself at risk, it is for no other reason than to prevent other neighbors from getting hurt. A healthy suspicion should be part of a healthy love.
No doubt our nation’s intelligence agencies will turn inward, to the domestic side of the threat that faces us. And we are free to ask all the what-ifs we want, as we should. But if we don’t ask, ‘What if we were more involved with our neighbors?’, there will be no end of tragedies.
Contratimes
Have a safe and honorable Memorial Day. Peace.
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