Editor,
I sat down for my morning tea on Thursday and read: "40 killed and three hundred injured in London blasts." Over the course of the next few days, we heard of more people dead and worse. It's always worse for those left behind. Some, who just missed the bus or rail, will feel relieved and guilty for being alive. Others will grieve and begin to try to pick up the pieces. The effects will ripple out. We'll feel them.
When students suffer a loss in their life, I advise them to tell stories and to use the stories to try to make sense. Stories force us to make sense of what has happened.
But what if there's little sense to be made? Terrorists do their work by sowing confusion, uncertainty and fear and cultivate these reactions with innocent blood. Terror thrives on confusion.
I suspect I'm not alone in not being able to make sense out of this last act of brutality - in my frustrated confusion, I want to help and I want to strike out. However, this time, I don't want to strike out blindly nor do I want to strike out at the usual suspects.
To say I've been disappointed with the war on terrorism would be an understatement. I've watched the rhetoric justifying the war develop from a hard focus on terrorism - a way of fighting a war - into something else, something much more ugly.
I've also been disturbed by the fact that Americans have allowed essential liberties to erode in the name of safety. I teach early American literature, so I'll quote Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If our society can no longer afford the free circulation and debate of unpopular ideas, then it is a society that is no longer the one envisioned by the likes of Franklin. Those who signed the Declaration of Independence wagered life and honor to construct a new way of living where they could hold unpopular opinions and speak them to others, and it's wrong to let these liberties erode simply because we're scared that we might be next.
Yes, I'm pissed off. Yes, I'm scared. I feel a confused anger and a focused sympathy for the innocent lives cut short and changed by this last act of brutality. At least in this, the terrorists succeeded.
It's past time that we as a people decided what it is that we're fighting and quit thinking of this war as one against a nation or an ideology. We cannot afford to wage this war like those of the past.
To quote John Stuart Mill, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
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Stephen Brandon
UNM faculty
