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The Streets of New York
I grew up fifty miles from New York City; in my younger days I haunted the
surplus joints on Cortlandt Street. I remember when they were torn down
to make way for the new World Trade Center.
I remember walking alone, a white highschool kid from the suburbs,
down 125th street through the middle of Harlem. The streets of New York
weren't especially safe, but if you kept your wits about you and didn't
piss off anyone they weren't especially dangerous, either.
I wouldn't bet on Osama bin Laden or one of his gang of thugs lasting as
long as five minutes on the streets of New York this week. I love peace,
and justice, and don't believe in the death penalty. BUT. Perhaps it's
just as well for his health that bin Laden isn't walking the streets of
New York tonight, and just as well for what would have been left of my
principles that I'm not there to help. Not that the New Yorkers would
need it.
Stephen Savitzky, September 2001
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Questions
When we have reduced Kabul to a pile of smoking ruins,
when we have paved the sands of the Middle East with glowing slag,
will we deal generously with the trembling victims of our righteous wrath?
Or will our puppet dictators, squatting on the rubble-heaps we've given them,
bleeding their people dry to feed the thirst of our just, stern reparations,
again breed consuming hatred in another desperate band of holy warriors?
When we have installed Internet Informer on every computer,
built a back door into every encryption device, tapped every phone,
installed a webcam in every bedroom, traced every call, recorded
each purchase made on a credit card, every password and mouse click,
installed a GPS transponder on every car, boat, bicycle and skateboard,
when everything is known and nothing can be concealed,
will we at last be foresighted enough to see our peril in advance?
Or will the next blow be swift and unerring, not by air but by net,
aimed anew at our most naked weakness? Will the World Wide Web melt down
in a hellish quarter hour of viruses and worms, our plundered credit
vanishing out the back door like a plume of smoke?
When we have licensed razor blades and outlawed pen-knives,
when we've traded our privacy for an easy promise of safety,
stifled all dissent, all talk of hatred except, of course, of those
our government gives us permission to hate,
when the courts have siezed the assets of anyone associated with
a terrorist organization, and the local police have pocketed the loot,
will we have any rights left worth fighting for?
When the former countrymen of our dead attackers have changed their names
to Jones or Smith or something else that gives no hint of their nationality
or their religion, straightened their hair, bleached their skin,
put steeples, crosses, and stained-glass windows on their places of worship,
will we stop the new crusade and go back to our old, traditional hatreds?
Will we once again jeer at the weak and intelligent children,
beat homosexuals coming out of leather bars, blow up abortion clinics,
drag teachers of evolution behind pickups, train in our excellent camps
the jackbooted police and terror squads of our friends and allies,
as we once trained the freedom fighters who drove our erstwhile enemies,
the Soviets, out of Afghanistan, as we trained a Saudi named bin Laden?
Do I want to know the answers?
When it's all over, when the smoke has blown away,
when the stench of burning flesh and the smell of sweat and fear
and the odor of sanctity have vanished on the breeze,
when the morning sun glints on the glassy rims of the craters
that were Baghdad and San Francisco,
will we be able to live with what we will have become?
Stephen Savitzky, September 2001
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Uncomfortable Thoughts
I am struck by the uncomfortable thought that, back when our enemy was the
Soviet Union, we trained and equipped ``freedom fighters'' in Afghanistan.
One of them was Osama bin Laden -- he was trained by the same CIA that now
complains about restrictions on whom they can recruit. Are they training
his successor now? Nor was this an isolated aberration; we have a long
history of aiding whoever was fighting to overthrow our enemies, and
conveniently ignoring such minor faults on their part as death squads,
torture, corruption, and, yes, even terrorism.
I am struck by the uncomfortable thought that the same president who is
calling for a ``crusade'' against terrorism, currently exemplified by a
few Islamic fundamentalists, was brought to power largely by Christian
fundamentalists, a few of whom have been waging their own campaign of
terror against abortion providers and homosexuals. Religious fanaticism
is a powerful weapon, but fundamentalist regimes tend to be extremely
unpleasant to live under.
I am struck by the uncomfortable thought that our nation's military
forces once destroyed a village in Vietnam -- man, woman, and child --
``in order to save it.'' That in our fight against ``rogue nations''
wielding weapons of mass destruction, we have not foresworn the use of
first-strike nuclear weapons or land mines. That, even as terrorists
plotted to turn airplanes into missiles, we have been testing a ballistic
missile ``defense'' that can, on a good day, shoot down a carefully-aimed
test missile that is known to be on its way -- one time out of three.
I am struck by the uncomfortable thought that hate breeds hate, terror
breeds terror, that fear and hatred give rise to injustice and repression,
and that these in turn breed people who feel that they have nothing left
to lose in the fight against those who hate them.
I am struck by the uncomfortable thought that the last terrorist to blow
up a building on our soil was a right-wing extremist named McVey, inflamed
to desperate action by attacks by his own government -- my
government -- on his friends and fellow extremists. Now we have declared
a crusade against terrorists, and the Taliban have declared a jihad
against the US in turn.
And so we embark upon the latest Holy Crusade, the War On Terrorism, no
doubt encouraged by our successes in the War On Drugs, the War On Crime,
the War On Poverty, and the War in Vietnam. Oh. Right. Sorry.
Where was I?
Deja vu is a very uncomfortable feeling.
Stephen Savitzky, September 2001
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Holy War?
Is this a new kind of war? Is it even a war at all? I'm not so sure.
Wars are conflicts between nations; the terrorist networks we're facing
now are not nations. Some nations may be using them as tools, as weapons
of a sort, but they are not at war with us -- yet. And they are not alone
in using terrorists as their tools: our own CIA has played that game.
But neither are the terrorists madmen or criminals. Criminals do not
sacrifice their lives to strike a desperate blow for their beliefs; madmen
do not band together by the hundred and plot for years toward a common
goal. Terrorism is the weapon of people who believe, to the core of their
being, that the cause they are fighting for is more important than life
itself -- their own or anyone else's.
Above all, these are not evil men we are pitted against. They are not
comic-book villains, killing for sport, doing evil deeds for evil's sake.
Oh, truly, their deeds are evil. But they themselves believe they are
doing good. Ask them: they will say that they are laying down their
lives, perhaps their immortal souls, to rid the world of a great,
malignant evil. Yes, there is a great evil abroad, but it is older than
bombs and airplanes, older than Islam and Christianity, perhaps even older
than fire and sharpened spears: it is the idea that only by hunting down
and exterminating those who are doing what we call evil can we bring about
the peace and harmony that we desire for the world.
Are you listening, Mr. President?
It does no good to reason with terrorists. If they thought they could
make their case by rational negotiation they would have done so. Most
likely they have already tried and been turned away. It does no good to
go to war with them -- they are not a nation and cannot be overcome and
forced to surrender. It may be possible to bring a few of them to
justice, but the ones that remain will not be deterred because they have
already vowed to die to advance their cause. What punishment could we
possibly threaten them with? And yet, they must be stopped.
This may not be a war, but it is a conflict: part of the age-long
struggle between good and evil. One does not defeat evil by becoming evil
oneself. One does not fight terror by inflicting a greater terror. One
does not overcome darkness by extinguishing the light.
Stephen Savitzky, September 2001
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Fear
I do not fear for my country. My country is strong, resilient. It was
built by immigrants who bravely journeyed here to wrest a living from an
unforgiving land -- and by the natives who fought them off. We waged a
bloody civil war that would have blown a lesser nation into smithereens --
our union is the stronger for it. We may seem soft and ineffective, and
divided against ourselves, and indeed we are soft, ineffective,
and divided as long as we have no common foe on whom to concentrate our
fury and our fear.
No, I do not fear for my country. I fear what we can do. I fear that
we might lash out, like some huge wounded animal, flailing our claws at
anything that comes near. I fear that we might strike blindly, crudely,
hastily, at the first plausible target that presents itself. I fear,
above all, that we might not be able to stop ourselves -- that the wounded
beast might continue raging over the world, trampling innocent victims
long after the homes of those who sheltered the guilty have
been reduced to rubble. I fear that we might go to such lengths as to sow
the seeds of yet another band of warriors fueled by hatred against us.
I do not fear for my fellow citizens. We come together in times of
crisis, neighbor helping neighbor, volunteers working to exhaustion;
people who in easier times would pass on the street without a glance now
greet one another as friends. Perhaps we always were, and never knew it.
On my weekly walk by Los Gatos Creek I said ``good morning'' to a man I've
walked past perhaps a hundred times. Seeing me on my way back he remarked
on the weather; we had a pleasant talk. I like our new-found sense of
community, but I fear it a little. The line between a band of brothers
and an angry mob is sometimes a little too thin, and our history holds not
only search parties and barn raisings but lynch mobs and church bombings.
But most of all, I fear our leaders. Our president calls for a
``crusade'' -- a ``holy war,'' yet! I've heard that rhetoric before, and
I fear it no less from Bush than from bin Laden. Our congressmen call for
restrictions on encryption, not knowing that only strong encryption stands
between the Internet and its total destruction, not caring that the web of
terrorist cells communicated by word of mouth and hand-carried notes.
They call for us to give up some of our privacy and freedom to assure our
safety. But when the danger has passed, I fear that more of our privacy
and freedom will have vanished than we would ever have allowed a foreign
oppressor to take by force. Among over five hundred politicians in
congress, only a single voice was raised to object to the
resolution authorizing the use of military force -- in whatever measure
our leaders may deem necessary, against an enemy they have yet to
identify. And when the CIA comes demanding permission to recruit
terrorists as spies, I doubt that even a single voice will be raised to
ask who trained our current foes, and who will be training their
inevitable replacements.
I do not fear for my country; I fear what my country can become. I fear
that in the rest of the world my country will be, not loved or respected,
but hated and feared. At home I fear for the freedom, the sense of
community, the gloriously chaotic diversity that make this country great,
and strong, and resilient. I fear that our country may win its war, and
lose its soul.
Stephen Savitzky, September 2001
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