Thinking the unthinkable

I learned a bitter lesson in thinking about the unthinkable last winter. We had two dogs, one of which, a Rottweiler, had a distinct predisposition for roaming. We were living in a secluded area which didn’t have much traffic, and where most of the dogs are allowed to run free. While I was concerned about the dog getting hit by a car, I felt reassured after being told by those more familiar with the area that I did not have anything to worry about. And after a few weeks, I relaxed my strict safety-first philosophy and was letting her run around off-leash like everyone else.

When she was hit and killed by a car five months later, it was cold comfort to hear that I was not to blame, that it wasn’t really my fault because I was “just doing what everybody does.” Because it was my fault, and the fatal accident would have been easily prevented had I only continued to do what I knew I should. What I learned from the incident is that what everybody does is to refuse to admit the possibility of the unpleasant, even when they have good reason to know better. It was both ironic and infuriating to learn later that several of the people who had assured me that nothing bad was likely to happen had lost more than one dog to cars themselves, some in that same area.

What is unthinkable about the current situation is not that al-Qaida might release biological agents into the water supply, or set off a nuclear device in a shipping port. If Islamic terrorists are indeed responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, and there is every indication that they are, then it has already been made abundantly clear that there are no limits to their willingness to wreak death and devastation on the United States. Whatever weapons they have will be used. Furthermore, it defies logic to believe that with the terrorists’ financial resources and their connections to states like Iraq and the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union, they do not have access to both biological agents and some form of fissionable material. Indeed, the Israeli arrest of a terrorist in possession of a crude dirty bomb – a radiological dispersal device, a conventional weapon designed to disperse poisonous radioactive material – is almost certain proof that they have such weapons and intend to use them against us.

But as hideous as these thoughts are, they do not fall into the realm of the unthinkable. No, what is more troubling by far is the notion that the U.S. government is somehow complicit with these terrorists, or is permitting them relatively free reign in which to operate. This may sound ludicrously paranoid, of course, but the facts are such that the concept demands a fair hearing. It is not an impossibility, after all. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the federal government has been blatantly lying to the American people about many things ranging across a wide spectrum of events, from the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut to TWA Flight 800 and Oklahoma City and many other, less significant events.

The question, as always, eventually comes down to the central issue of incompetence or evil. While I myself have tended toward the incompetence argument for many years, over time I have come to rethink my position. My reason is that history repeatedly shows that in every society, there are those who are not content with the wealth and power which they already possess, who ardently lust after the ability to exert power over their fellow men. The histories of Athens, Byzantium, and Rome are filled to the point of monotony with the repetitive accounts of one power-seeking scheme after another. Does it not seem ludicrous to assert that such a driving aspect of human nature has been somehow defanged by our republican form of democracy, especially when our current culture puts the lie to the myth of human progress in a thousand different ways? Abraham Lincoln, no innocent when it came to the art of power, warned about such men, and our founding fathers structured the Constitution in such a way as to defend against their ambitions.

There is not the space, in this single column, to explain the Socratic roots of the perverted Hegelian thinking that would justify the deaths of 5,000 innocents in order to establish order out of chaos. But two things should be made clear. First, there are elements both within and without the federal government that are at war with the U.S. Constitution. These elements have both motive and opportunity to, at the very least, make use of the current situation to further their insidious ambitions to become what they already believe themselves to be, what Plato once called the Guardians of the State.

Second, it is not only dangerous, but illogical to expect the federal government to protect you. Federal courts have determined that even the state police have no responsibility for you. Furthermore, it is insane to expect the same institution which provides inferior schools and many other inferior services to provide superior security. It is worth remembering that the only effective defense measures on Sept. 11 were those taken by the private citizens on United Flight 93. This will, I suspect, only become more and more clear over time, and I hope that freedom-loving Americans will respond by embracing their responsibilities and refrain from turning in fear toward the only entity that is capable, in the end, of destroying their liberty.