Legacy of Fear
posted in General |I’m driving the girls this morning, we’re off to our friend L’s place. She’s going to watch them while I go to work. I turn right, around a blind corner, onto an onramp to a highway. Behind me is a skyline of the city, before me is a tunnel. I see a van on the right. pulled over; one of the big panel vans (like UPS), not a SUV. There’s a guy, there, bent over the rear wheel, fiddling with it. As I come up to him, he turns slowly around, holding something small in front of him with both hands. He brings it up to his face, to look through it. As I pass him, I realize that he’s got a cell phone camera, and he’s taking a picture of where he is.
But, you know, he could be using his cell phone to detonate a bomb on the MAX train. Or taking a picture of the busy tunnel, to plot out the structural flaws. Or any number of things that leapt immediately to mind, as I’m speeding away from him.
This, to me, is the legacy of September 11. We can no longer trust that “a guy changing his tire” is really a guy changing his tire. No matter how many rights the government takes away (the “Patriot Act”) , no matter how many airplane passengers get their box knives taken away, it’s still going to be there. And until Americans realize that we need a more appropriate response to it than living in fear, that legacy will remain.
Stop the war; figure out why they hate us. Fix the hate. Don’t be making more terrorists than we can kill. I don’t want North Portland to become Belfast, Portland to become Beirut.
