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That feeling again On the Brink of...What?By Rick Horowitz
"We will never feel safe again." He says the words aloud. For days now, the words have been banging around in his head, and in the pit of his stomach. Now, for the first time, he speaks them, tries them on for size. And they fit. He shudders at just how well they fit -- like a tailored suit. Like a ball and chain. "We will never feel safe again." He listened closely to the president's speech. (He tried not to dwell on the fact that, on the station he was watching, the speech had replaced a program called "Veritas: The Quest.") He heard the president set out the reasons for war, and the dangers that come with complacency, with inaction. We can't afford not to act, the president explained, not in an age of tyrants and terrorists and murderous technologies. If we wait until we've been hit, the president argued, we've waited too long. So we have to hit first -- it's the only way we'll find peace, and spread peace. A deadline, and then war. He listened closely, and he had to admit: There was something compelling in the president's argument. This is a new century. What good are the old rules? If we can't even be sure of finding our enemies, then how effective is the threat of retaliation? And if our enemies are perfectly willing -- even eager -- to die for their various causes, then what's the use of "deterrence"? Better to hit them now (the ones we can find, at least), while we have the chance. Before they hit us. There was something compelling in the president's argument, but then, why that awful feeling growing inside him? If the president was so convincing, shouldn't he be feeling better, not worse? Shouldn't he have cheerier things to do than catalog which of his friends, which members of his family, live or work how chillingly close to which potential terrorist targets? Shouldn't he be able to pack for a simple business trip without having to calculate which flights, on which airlines, through which airports, offer him the best chance of making it home again? Certainly he should. But he can't. There was something else, underneath the president's argument, that kept clawing at him. The feeling, perhaps, that the president's most influential advisers had been heading in this direction, spoiling for this particular fight, years before the reasons came along to justify it. The feeling that the president had signed on for the fight because the enemy is evil and we're good and that's the end of the discussion: Go get 'em, and damn the consequences. Except -- and he understood this even as the president was speaking -- we'll have to deal with the consequences. The consequences of angering so many friends. The consequences of creating so many new enemies. The consequences of bluster and swagger, of playing a winning hand so carelessly. This particular fight may conclude quickly, and triumphantly. (He certainly hopes it concludes quickly and triumphantly.) But the fight, he knows, won't really be over. People have long memories. So he catalogs and he calculates, and he sees no end to it, not in his lifetime. He remembers "duck and cover." He remembers growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, when the end of the planet was always only minutes away. True, he once believed that those feelings would never vanish either, yet they did. But it took decades. Does he have decades? There was a moment (already it seems so distant) when the cold war was finally won and the new war hadn't yet revealed itself, when he could let down his guard. When he could let himself believe they'd come through the worst of it. Now he wonders how he could have been so naive. He opens his mouth, and once more the words fall out. "We will never feel safe again." Posted 3/18/03. Get
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Rick Horowitz
