Retreating From Fear

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Bertrand Russell

For the better part of five years, we were a nation ruled by fear. Worse than that, we were a nation controlled by fear. Right up to the final moments of the campaign, fear was flogged. There were terrorists everywhere who hated our freedoms and wanted to kill us all. A vote for the Democrats, we were told, was a vote to surrender to the terrorists.

I was rather bemused by the whole thing. What the whole fear of terrorism meme boiled down to was this: We were supposed to be afraid of fear. And the corpse of Franklin Roosevelt got up out of it's grave and departed the nation in disgust.

We as a nation owe the world an appology. We are better than this, or at least we like to fancy ourselves as such. Because we did not stand up to fear, we allowed our nation to be misled and a war with no end in sight is raging in the middle east, threatening to destabilize the entire region.

Because we were afraid, we allowed this war to be launched illegally. Yes, pre-emptive war is illegal.

The mongers of fear were also the self-appointed guardians of patriotism, and they became parallel indicators...The more afraid you were, the more patriotic you were, apparently. Dissention was shouted down and dissenters were branded as traitors. The divisive language continued right up until the election returns started to roll in. In fact, dissent is not unpatriotic. Quite the contrary - dissent is the quintessential element that makes a free society truly free. Again I was bemused - because we are free, we have an obligation to not question our government? I started looking for evidence I had fallen through a looking glass.

Because we allowed ourselves to be manipulated by fear, we allowed our rights to be undermined by the patriot act. When it was reported that the NSA was spying on Americans, the outrage was not at the government for the spying it was at the paper for the reporting of the spying. People were proud to say "I have nothing to hide!" And in my Jewish heart, I heard breaking glass.

The final straw for me was the Military Commissions Act, the suspension of Habeus Corpus and the acceptance of torture as an interrogation technique. The Defense Authorization Act changed fundamentally the relationship between citizens and their Government by altering The Insurrection Acts and Posse Comitatus. The changes undertaken make it easier to use the military to restore order in the nation. There's a word for that folks. It's called Martial Law. When I realized this, I made an oath.

Over my dead body.

I'm all for revolutions, but I much prefer ballots to bullets.

Fortunately, when the big shows opened all over the country on November 7, fear wasn't present on any of the runways.

Most of us voted to abandon the politics of fear, and now we must reassess our situation. First we need to take stock anew of the struggle against terrorism. We are fighting a war against a transitive verb with the military and it is a fruitless venture. We must deal with terrorism, but we must also remember that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists.

Remember that Britain did not defeat the IRA militarily. The Troubles ended when the politicians struck their bargains, not because of British tanks in the streets of Belfast. A group calling themselves the Real Ira refused to honor the peace process and disarm. In 1998, they exploded a bomb in a marketplace in Omagh and killed 29 people. From both sides the outcry was swift and loud. The public pressure was so great that the group, the last of the armed insurgents fighting the British, disbanded and disarmed in 2002 and Northern Ireland now knows peace. The Omagh bombing destroyed any remnants of sympathy for the remaining terror cells. Now they are gone, but they are not missed. But they are not gone because the military crushed them. They are gone because of political and public pressure.

We need to make an opportunity if need be to take responsibility for some of the meddling the western world has engaged in that has been counter to the needs of the region. We need to abandon the black/white manner of looking at the world and instead build new international relationships based on respect. We should never refuse to talk to anyone, ever.

And for gods sake, admit that the real root cause of all the problems in the middle east is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From Eurasia to the Steppes, all roads lead to Jerusalem. We can't even put a piece on the board and start to play until we accept this qualifier.