Is this any way to run a country?
Closing down Congress until next week to sweep for anthrax spores? Shades of DUH-Bee-Yah fleeing … uh … vacating the Oval Office for temporary “safe” haven in Omaha after the 9-11 attacks. Running scared? We voted for these people.
Isn’t anyone in charge here?
What the United States government needs now as a calm and calming example to a jittery nation is stable leadership – not a bunch of vanishing escape artists at the slightest sniff of real terror. Don’t close! Public service is not a country club. Keep your commitments to the folks who elected you. Did anthrax contamination shut down that Florida tabloid titan? No, their CEO had them leave the building, set up shop somewhere else nearby, and keep publishing.
Continuity.
That should be the message America gives its terrorist “enemies”: If you hit us, if you hit us again and again, we won’t fall down! We won’t fold! We won’t be lemmings! We will stand up to your malevolent misdeeds which will not go unpunished.
The worst thing in the world is to cave in and close. That just gives “the terrorists” what they want: A clear signal we’re really running scared and approaching emotional meltdown. “Whoever this is,” commented a Brit buddy, “they just won round two.”
Instead, think like a terrorist. Think of ingenious ways to “weaponize” various aspects of ordinary American life. Our mail delivery, airliners, flight training centers, banking system, internet access and, yes, our gullibility. That is what the terrorists have done. Then, go one step further. Anticipate their moves, in advance, so you will not be shocked when and if the unthinkable happens.
Understand, you are trapped in your ingrained perspective of “Americentric” arrogance. Alas, contrary to our conditioning, the world doesn’t quite revolve around this country. And it never really did. We only thought so.
Try getting out of yourself for a moment and consider how the rest of the world sees the USA.
In his alarmingly prescient portrait, “The Twlight of American Culture,” published in the year 2000, innovative social critic and cultural historian Morris Berman of Johns Hopkins University predicts the American Empire, like ancient Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, has now seen the passage of its most triumphant years and is rapidly approaching a period of increased societal chaos.
“America, too, now has barbarians at the gates,” he warns in the Guardian, “and also, it would seem, within them. It, too, is committed to a war to the finish, ‘total victory,’ defined by President Bush as the point at which there are no longer any terrorist organizations capable of international reach – which some would say is a formula for permanent war.”
The question is not will we ever eradicate terrorism. That’s because to many folks living in “the rest of the world,” the United States is the most transgressive terrorist nation around. In their view, Terrorists-R-US. Who can forget Madeleine Albright shrugging off the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, blithely dismissing that abomination as “collateral damage” in the service of securing our larger national interests.
Look, it’s time for America to see itself accurately, the way others see us – as a rogue nation among rogue nations. Jingoism – boundless, unchecked approval for everything the USA does – acts as a kind of blinder on our true national self-awareness. We commodify everything – even catastrophe. Life – make that war – is not a Yankee game. Or even WWF wrestling. No, it’s not good guys and bad guys. That’s too simple, just falling into the mind-numbing acceptance of all the government-generated propaganda.
Fact is, Osama and Saddam are erstwhile CIA puppets, propped up, paid, trained and fed by the USA. That they have turned on us is not remarkable in the least. As Kinky Friedman, philosopher/musician/mystery author once observed, “Money may buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.”
It’s time for our leaders in Washington to lead. Colorado scholar and organizational coach Tom Heuerman, Ph.D., calls for leader-warriors imbued with character:
The warrior within each of us protects life and life’s natural processes by standing between evil and innocence. The leader alerts others to danger and mobilizes them to face reality and to take risks. The leader protects … the community from what is destructive. … Ruthless in pursuit of the goal, the warrior weds power with values, and strength with goodness. The warrior chooses justice over peace, diversity over conformity, risk over safety and personal responsibility over helplessness. In spite of fear, pain, danger, anxiety, difficulty and personal cost, the leader goes forward with faith, learning and adapting along the way.
