Terror In Our Times

I want to talk about terrorism. It's a word that our president certainly bandies about with great abandon on every occasion possible.

"It's a war," he says, with that slurry condescending voice of his, "You don't understand. It's a war on TERRORISM."

Yeah. We do understand, Pres. We remember when the towers came down and when the Pentagon was hit and we also remember you reading the My Pet Goat book looking confused, unsure and as idiotic as anyone on the planet. But hey! We were all confused, unsure and felt like big idiots- wondering what in the world we should be doing about this completely unimaginable event as we watched planes fly into the World Trade Center on live TV.

But oh yeah- we had the sense to stop what we were doing and watch the TV. Right?
But let's get past that.

Ever since that morning on 9/11, our president has used the term "terrorism" every time he wants to push any part of his right-wing, take-away-our-constitutional-freedoms agenda.

"Americans were killed," he says, and I know you can hear that voice of his, even as you read the words. "A-mar-i-kans." "So we need to be able to listen to your phone calls, read your e-mails, peer into your hearts to see if you are one of the evil-doers. To prevent more A-mar-i-kans from bein' killed by the terrorists."

Excuse me?

As if men from middle eastern countries with enough evil in their hearts to suicide bomb American targets with airplanes represented all the terror in the world.

How many Americans were killed in that attack?

Approximately 3,000.

And it was startling and it was unthinkable and I pray we never witness anything like that again.

But how many people have died since then in the so-called war against terrorism in Iraq? If you just count the Americans, that number would be a little over 3,700.
Iraqi casualty numbers are debated. One study showed that as many as 650,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the American led military intervention in Iraq. This number is highly disputed and could be as low as a tenth of that.

Still- at least 65,000 people are dead. We'll probably never know the true number. Our government refuses to keep track of Iraqi mortalities. Why?
Can I get a big ol' racist, jingoistic shrug here?

And that doesn't begin to list the numbers of all the other people killed, both Americans and other nationalities, since this whole war on so-called terror was begun. There are the coalition troops, the whole other war in Afganistan, the non-military "advisors" and suppliers and workers "over there" fighting this war on terror. So, just taken as pure numbers, I'd say that since we're the ones over there and we're the ones picking the fight, we're the terrorists.

But that's not really what I wanted to discuss. I wanted to discuss what terror really is. Okay, sure, it's terrifying when giant buildings are felled by planes. We all get that.

But it's also terrifying to get a bad medical diagnosis. Can there be any four more terrifying words than "the lump is malignant"? Or how about "your child has leukemia"? And what if the person hearing those words has no health insurance?

And there's the sort of terror that no one but a homeless woman with children can know. There's the terror a woman feels who is being beaten secretly and consistently by her spouse. Or the terror of a child who is being sexually abused by a family member. Or how about the terror someone might feel when they're driving over a bridge and it collapses? There's the terror of being raped, the terror of getting a phone call that tells you your child has been in a car wreck.

Terror. It doesn't just come dressed in a turban, armed with a box cutter. No, to be human is to know terror at some point in our lives.

And some of it is preventable and some of it just is not.

And I don't care what our president says, you can't possibly hunt out terror and destroy it. Even if you spend over 450,000,000 (that's just so far, folks!) dollars on one little war in one little country and we're not even going to discuss that fact that that country had nothing to do with the terror Americans experienced on 9/11.

But that amount of money would go a long way towards ensuring that every American has health care so that if they do get that terrible diagnosis, they are not left with nowhere to turn for treatment.

It would go quite a ways towards dealing with the aging infrastructure in this country. It would certainly help out with making sure that all our kids get a decent education and so have a way to support themselves, a way to get out of poverty and to avoid all the different ways poverty can be terrible.

That money could go for programs to help children and women who have been abused. It could go for research to help find cures for the diseases that create terror in those who have them. It could help feed the hungry, it could help find solutions for this vast problem of global warming that if we don't deal with RIGHT NOW could very well result in the end of life as we know it.

How's that for a terrifying prospect?

Frankly, the thought that evil-doers are going to bomb us doesn't strike nearly as much fear in my heart as does the worry that one of my children or my husband will fall ill and we won't have the funds to pay for the very best health care we can find. Nor do these evil-doers make me nearly as frightened as is a friend of mine whose son is about to go over to Iraq as a Marine.

"We must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." So says GW. I keep wondering if the terrorists are going to stow away in our (inadequately armored) humvees when we bring them home, planning to spring out with (stolen from us) weapons in their hands, spraying death and destruction.

I think that our president has led such a sheltered, protected life that he doesn't truly know a damn thing about terror. He thinks it's all about box cutters and planes and evil-doers.

We here in the real world know a lot more. And by God, why in the world we and our congress keep letting this man spend our money and chip away at our freedoms, and sacrifice our children's lives and the lives of countless others, is so vastly beyond me that I can't even begin to verbalize it.

All I can say is that having that man in charge of the free world feels a lot like...terror.