"I've never felt this patriotic," said my friend Erin, "The footage makes me sad every time I see it replayed, thinking of the people in the planes... I need closure. [I need] vengeance."
"Justice will be done," said President Bush, as American flags pop up like mushrooms after rain. Go USA! Let's kick some ass!
When Bush called for "justice," like Erin, he actually meant "vengeance." He meant, "Let's go find whoever did this, and mess him up real bad! That'll learn 'em!" And most Americans seem to agree with him. As of Monday morning, polls indicated that the approval rating for military action is as high as 91 percent. In a "democracy," that much agreement is just plain scary.
I'm scared, real scared. The line from patriotism to jingoism is very fine, and when it's crossed, we forget that citizens of other nations are people; rather, innocent people. The 150,000 refugees who are now fleeing for their lives, desperate to clear out of Afghanistan's major cities, didn't even elect their own government.
The Taliban may be responsible either for the attacks or for sheltering Osama bin Laden, which by Islamic tradition, it is bound to do. It seems, for a nation that prides itself on religious freedom, interesting that we're demanding that the Taliban abandon its own religious principles.
However, Afghani citizens shouldn't die because their non-elected government is, by US standards, "evil." Their lives are just as valuable as anyone else's, and if we bomb Afghanistan, every citizen who dies there will be somebody's mother, son, sister, cousin, lover, or friend.
The attacks last week were so heinous that many Americans feel that a few deaths in a faraway country are a necessary price to pay in order to assure domestic security in the future. Americans are angry, hurt, and scared of further attacks. The common reasoning goes: If we don't retaliate, then the world will see that we're vulnerable, and we'll be attacked again. Or, as my friend Marcus says, "Either you eat the bear or the bear eats you." Another line of "reasoning" evokes the Old Testament and says, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - my dead (insert brother, friend, mother, or coworker here) needs to be avenged."
I'll address the second attitude (the "justice = vengeance" position). First, those of you who are chanting "retaliate!" are calling for a lynching - you want to exchange death for death, blood for blood. This is an understandable, but primitive and cruel, compulsion. One only needs to look at the situation in Israel to see that violence is a cycle; each side continues to retaliate for the retaliation, for the retaliation, for the retaliation, and so on.
In addition to the practical concern I just mentioned, there is also the moral aspect to consider, which is this: calling for war makes you just as evil as the perpetrators of the airplane attacks. Why? Because you want to kill innocent people, just like they did.
We use the word "war" instead of "mass murder," but the fact is, we can't bomb Afganistan without killing innocent people, so murder it is. To this, my friend Marcus said, "Well, they should leave Afghanistan," but the borders to Iran and Pakistan have been closed, and a massive internal refugee crisis is no picnic itself.
As for the "eat the bear or the bear eats you" attitude, this is the same desire for ultimate security that Hobbes described so long ago. The idea is that survival in today's world has become so shaky that we need a leviathan (any government with a 90% approval rating is veering towards leviathan, or in other words, fascist, status) to protect us. Well I for one am willing to accept some insecurity, if that's the price to pay for freedom. I don't want to live in a society where only 10% of the population dares to challenge the government's decisions.
If forgoing a war on Afghanistan means that potential terrorists think we're weak, so be it. If I or someone I love dies in a future attack, so be it. Yes, I'm willing to die for my beliefs, which are threefold: One, that it's wrong to kill; two, that it's wrong for a huge powerful country to bomb a smaller, poorer one; and three, that instead of diving into bloodthirsty jingoism, Americans should be asking themselves, "What is it that we're doing wrong, that has caused someone to hate us so much?"
