We packed a season’s worth of memories into ten or so days, from navigating the
Parisian subway system to shooting a zucchini off the top of a twenty-foot tall
ladder during an impromptu, culturally authentic “shutzenfest” in
Germany. One particular memory, however, that didn’t seem all that
profound at the time but that has grown in interest as the years have dashed
past, took place during our second day in London.
So there we were, relaxing in a restaurant beneath the London Eye, the city’s
iconic giant Ferris wheel. We were killing time, waiting for our journey
to France on the Eurostar, while behind us out in the street, a large tow truck
with an actual crane attached to it slowly lifted a car from its parking spot
and onto the back of its bed. Soon both the truck and the car
pulled away, leaving the spot empty.
“Does
that happen quite a bit?” I asked a patron to my right.
“Sometimes.” He replied.
“But they’re being a lot more careful since two weeks ago.”
The
“two weeks ago” he was referring to at the time was a failed car bombing
attempt at an airport in Glasgow. That day,
in fact, July 7th, was the two year anniversary of the London bus bombing
that had killed over sixty people.
We
were all from small town Illinois, and so such considerations weren’t exactly
on the forefront of our concerns, at least not back home. Throughout the
rest of the trip, though, trekking as we were through some of the most densely
populated spots on the Continent, we often bumped into such reminders that the
world we lived in could be a very dangerous place.
That
was a decade ago, and in the last ten years, I’ve often thought back to that
very simple event. Every time terrible news came out of London, or Paris,
or any other place on Earth suffering from yet another sick and violent event,
my mind would eventually ask the same question: Now what?
Because the fact is, we have had awhile to figure all this out. We
often think back to 9/11 as the turning point in this struggle, and, in many
ways, particularly for Americans, it was.
But
terrorism has been around a long time, predating ISIS or Al Qaeda. The
organized use or threat of violence to achieve a political end has been part of
the human condition for thousands of years. Three basic things, however,
make modern terrorism much different than what it was in the past.
The primary
change, it seems, is the magnitude of the threat itself. Terrorists now
have the destructive capacity unimagined in previous decades. Secondly,
our civilization itself is more densely populated and our borders more porous,
making such violence much more potent. Finally, our modern media, social
and otherwise, inadvertently give terrorists the attention they seek.
All these reasons have allowed terrorists to be the bogeyman of our times the
way Soviet communists or Nazis were for recent generations, and besides moving
your family to a cabin in the woods, sometimes it seems there is little the
average citizen can do about it all. Islamist extremists have throttled
their religion in a way that shocks most of us, including the vast majority of
Muslims who simply want to live out their lives in peace.
Before continuing, I
want to pause briefly and return to our journey from ten years ago, where one
of the highlights was the two relatively peaceful days we spent in Normandy,
France. Far removed from the hustle that characterized much of our trip,
we grown up farm kids from Illinois could relax a little in the relatively
rural solitude. We found the beaches of Normandy refreshingly
undisturbed; the numerous villages relaxed and friendly.
It has occurred to me that Normandy is where America, from a broad historical
perspective, at least, shines brightest. We often gloss over the parts of
World War Two that aren’t as heroic—such as the injustice of the Japanese
interment or the carnage of Hiroshima—but on the beaches of Normandy, we focus
our historical lenses. This is our nation, we often proclaim, at
its very best: storming a beach, bleeding against an enemy, vanquishing
evil one village at a time.
It might make sense, then, to model other struggles we come against in the same
terms. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, America is relatively good
at war; our history from the beginning has been very much linked to this
martial success, and so we’ve developed the habit of simply declaring war on
everything we don’t like. Poverty. Drugs.
Terror.
The problem, of course, is that poverty is still around, more than a half
century after President Johnson targeted it in his sights. Drugs, too,
have outlasted every Chief Executive since Nixon and clearly aren’t going
anywhere anytime soon.
Granted, terrorism, because it is by its nature violent, does respond to
violence in the short term. The long term problem, however, with
declaring war on terrorism is that this problem affects all of us and most of
us don’t see ourselves a soldiers. We don’t personalize the issue until after
the fact; until after the bomb has exploded, until after the gunman has been
shot by the police, and even then we move on with our lives unless someone we
actually know has been killed.
Any
winnable “war on terror” would need to be waged as a total war, by soldiers and
civilians alike. For the sake of brevity, in a few weeks this column will consider what such a struggle
would look like by taking a cue from the world of medicine.
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