 |  | ||||
|
Wednesday, September 12, 2001 Waking up to a where-were-you-when-you-heard-the-news dayFOOTNOTE | By Mark Lane I was wandering around the Capitol on a clear, warm September day like this one 22 years ago. The Senate was in session. The House was not. I knew the House wasn't meeting because I happened upon one of the doors to the chamber, poked my head in and found the place empty. I saw the familiar picture from every grade school civics book -- rows of empty wooden desks in a stately semicircle. Congress is very impressive when there are no congressmen around to spoil the effect. How sadly quaint that moment seems now. How Victorian. That a person dressed like a student might wander the corridors of the Capitol unchallenged, unsearched and without a badge. Stopping only to ask the old guys in blue blazers where the bathroom was. As of Tuesday, we no longer live in that kind of world -- all open doors, easy movement and the presumption of safety. As of Tuesday, we are now bound up in all the scariness and hate of the wider planet. Something has been irrevocably lost and it is felt in every American town and city. We wake up to a different world today. A world where, when we hear an ambulance siren wail, we don't automatically assume a car hit something. A world of checkpoints, metal detectors, ID badges and "please step over here, sir." A world where the old talk of something called "a global village" sounds silly and vaguely hippielike. This is a global battleground, buster, where any place might be host to any geopolitical or ethnic face-off anywhere. A world where there's no hiding behind oceans, behind money, behind technology, beneath missile defense systems or behind the notion things are different here. A world where secrecy, hatred and fear will feed a reactive festival of wing-nuttery, conspiracy theory, fear of foreigners and creative hatred. We have witnessed a spectacle of anonymous violence so amazing that now anything seems possible. This is one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard-the-news days. When the world changed all at once and we knew it all at once and we knew it would be bad and we could recall the very spot we stood. It is school kids hearing about John F. Kennedy's assassination on a crackling PA system. It is the dead air when the radio stopped in midsong to announce Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. Those events were assassinations of political leaders. Just one person. Not city blocks, buildings and airliners filled with travelers, workers, husbands and wives and children. Evil works on an entirely different scale now. Implied in any act of terrorism is that open societies can't stand much strain. You hit them and they turn into brittle little police states and then you win. The way we travel, our freedom of movement in public places and our sense of safety are changed. There will be inconveniences and that's OK. There will be new rituals at the airline ticket counter and that's to be expected. There will be attempts to make us more closed off, fearful, and secretive about public business, and that should be resisted. That's how the bad guys win. I tell my kids about wandering through the seat of the federal government on a late-summer day and they suspect exaggeration. They can't wander through a county courthouse that way. I don't know what they will come to think of as normal. I suspect the worst. As I watch the replayed, looped and slowed video clips of the second hijacked airliner banking into the World Trade Center, it seems this is an age where action-movie plots move seamlessly from the movie channels to the news channels and one looks like the other. We will adapt to this new reality -- adapting to new realities is what America excels at -- but we should be careful of what we give up in the process. Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. He can be reached at mark.lane@news-jrnl.com HICI Special Report — Terrorism Takes Its Toll: and the World Takes Charge… |
Copyright © 2010 NIE WORLD (www.nieworld.com). All content copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. The News-Journal has no control over and is not responsible for content on other Web sites. Privacy Policy. |