To fear no evil
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Editorial
05/22/02
It is "inevitable," the director of the FBI tells a convention of district attorneys, that zealots wrapped in dynamite and fantasies of Paradise will wreak on American crowds at some unknowable time the suicidal rage they have brought to the streets of Israel.
The vice president of the United States is equally pessimistic, and even less specific. Another attack by al-Qaida is "almost certain," Dick Cheney tells a national television audience. But whatever form it may take - and he does not elaborate - it could come "tomorrow or next week or next year."
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee treats as fact the yet-unconfirmed reports, first attributed to the Coast Guard, that 25 "extremists" have infiltrated through at least three large coastal ports, slipping ashore from hiding places in cargo containers.
And sources in the intelligence community say that the "chatter" - communications among known terrorist cells - is louder, much the way it was in the days before 9/11 and before the capture in March of al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaydah.
Thus approaches the first summer of our war against terror, and we in this open society remain singularly vulnerable to the horror of random mass murder. Grisly scenarios abound: Will they poison water supplies? Blow up the pipelines that move the oil and gas that feeds our commerce? Pirate a dirty little nuclear bomb into a major city?
Or will the vast and overlapping bureaucracies of our various governments' protective services, so ill-prepared to fight this kind of warfare, somehow succeed in thwarting the attacks that our leaders all anticipate? Indications are that they have, in some measure, stalled the terrorists' post-September plots. But, much as we'd like to hope they will continue to be successful, it's a thin reed to grasp. History shows that, even in the most repressive societies, a handful of dedicated individuals can inflict much suffering and damage.
It is, for many Americans, a most difficult time to fear no evil. Yet that is what we are being called upon to do - to continue our lives in awareness of the danger, but not in debilitating fear of it. Indeed, the alternative is to give the victory to our enemies. And that, regardless of threats both real and perceived, we cannot allow to happen.
It is a time, rather, to reach to the bedrock of our national faith, of our belief in a system of openness and liberty. It is a time to live as the free people we are. It is that freedom they hate, and that freedom we must preserve.
© 2002 The Plain Dealer.
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