The scared republic

I was in Canada following the subway bomb attacks in London on July 7 and had the chance to compare the reaction of the Canadian media to that of the American media. The Canadian focus was on London, the reaction of its citizens, and the progress of the investigation. The American reaction touched those same points and then turned to the prospects of an attack on subways in the United States. While the Canadian media were outraged, yet informative, the American media were outraged and fearful.

A similar contrast was apparent in the BBC coverage. The British recalled the resolve they had displayed during Hitler’s aerial bombing in World War II and showed the same stiff upper lip in the current troubles. Americans fearfully fretted whether subways in Detroit were next.

A terrorist watching American television now knew that a bombing five time zones away terrorized Americans. He could smirk: “Mission accomplished.” Has a nation which boasts of being the “the home of the brave” lost the right to make that claim? Why has fear consumed so many of us?

The answer begins with an analysis of the aftermath of Sept. 11. How has our national leadership reacted to that crisis in comparison with leaders who faced even more trying times?

Abraham Lincoln, on July 12, 1864, as Washington was being attacked by Confederate troops, went to the scene of the battle at Fort Stevens just six miles from the Capitol Dome. He wished the citizens of Washington and the nation to know that there was no need to panic. Having rallied the citizens of the capital as he rode out to Fort Stevens, he rallied the troops as the battle raged. He walked to the highest parapet of the fort; at six feet four, topped by a stovepipe hat, he presented an inviting target to Confederate riflemen. A nearby officer was dropped by one of the whizzing bullets.

On Sept. 11, 2001, George Bush left a Florida school and was flown in secret to a Louisiana air base. His whereabouts was withheld from the nation in the critical hours after the attacks. Vice President Dick Cheney, for a long period after the attacks, was said to be in an undisclosed location. Both men, by their actions, told the nation that it should be fearful. Without intending it, they helped the terrorists advance their agenda: to terrorize.

In the speeches Bush and Cheney have made after Sept. 11, the message has been consistent: other attacks were certain; there were allegedly hundreds of sleeper cells throughout the United States, waiting to commit further acts of terrorism. Any citizen who took what his leaders said at face value would believe we had everything to fear.

As I listened to these speeches and saw the oft-repeated color-coded warnings, I yearned for the president who led us through the far more trying times of the Great Depression and World War II. Franklin Roosevelt faced a nation that had experienced devastating dislocations: unemployment stood at 25 percent; banks and businesses had failed in record numbers; a third of the nation was ill-fed and ill-housed, and the remaining two thirds feared that a similar fate awaited them. Although there were not 3,000 deaths in a single day, the Great Depression was experienced directly by every American then living.

Although America surely faced a more dire future in 1933 than it faced on Sept. 11. 2001, Roosevelt didn’t market fear as Bush and Cheney have. He told us that we had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear, itself, was the enemy. If we faced it and refused to let it defeat us, we could overcome any obstacle.

While Lincoln, by his actions, and Roosevelt, by his words, reminded us that we are the “home of the brave,” Bush and Cheney, by their actions and words, have taught us to be the Republic of Fear.

Our leaders have failed us. They have enabled and empowered the terrorists. Some might say this failure ultimately springs from crass calculations of political advantage; perhaps Bush and Cheney felt that a fearful nation would re-elect them.

I think this failure stems from something more intrinsic to both men: a lack of moral and physical courage. Both showed their lack of physical courage when, in the 1960s, they supported the Vietnam War but took extraordinary efforts to avoid service in it.

Both men have shown a lack of moral courage in the way they have manipulated the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq that has been poorly planned, undermanned, and funded not with taxes on their own wealth, but with borrowing against our grandchildren’s futures. Both men believe, by their actions, that sacrifice is for someone else, not them. Neither man, despite the increasingly grim news from the battlefield and the increasing probability that Iraq is headed to a civil war and permanent division, has shown the moral courage to admit that he has made a grave mistake with our children’s lives and our grandchildren’s fortunes.

We are still the home of the brave, but we are led by two moral cowards who would rather that we become the Republic of Fear.

Arthur J. Greif is a Bangor attorney.