| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front |
| Maureen's scared. Somebody do something. |
| 2001-09-15 |
WASHINGTON — My mom wore a red satin blouse on Friday to please the president and insisted that I look in my closet for red, white and blue, too. We're all burning with patriotism and pride and sorrow and anger. But beneath our determination to get through this, we're afraid, just as jittery as the kids who cling and cry and crawl into bed with parents. The adults of this capital are jumpy, driving the wrong way on one-way streets rather than waiting for soldiers in Humvees to untangle traffic, flinching at the sound of planes. The young men and women who work at the White House confess that they are scared to return there each day. We worry that the faceless enemy is still lurking nearby. We have been jolted by the realization that while those smart missiles we saw in Desert Storm could go down chimneys, they cannot protect us from a handful of guys with box cutters and plastic knives. And the realization that we don't yet know how to fight this evil in the Afghan heart of darkness, a place that rebuffed the British empire and the Russians, described by Kipling in "The Man Who Would Be King" as "one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it. . . . The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn't do anything." And the realization that all our security systems failed. Terrorists could live among us as a fifth column, drinking beer in our bars and getting Americans to unwittingly train them to kill other Americans — even when they drove a car sporting a pro-Osama bin Laden sticker. We've known for a long time that the terrorists are coming at us. We've known for a long time that the C.I.A. has spiraled into an identity crisis since the cold war and lost both its best James Bonds and stoolies. We've known for a long time that the F.B.I. is prone to bungling. Why not start fresh — and fast — with a new security agency, unleashing an elite squad with plenty of human spies and putting Rudy Giuliani in charge of the global "Untouchables"? The president will have to forgive the mayor for having warm words for John McCain during the New York primary, but desperate times require desperate measures. We will soon see whether this shattering crisis will make him more supple, complex and clever. Can he, Cheney, Rummy and Condi move past the cold war attitude and Star Wars obsession that has alienated the countries we will need to help us fight an enemy too shadowy to be stopped by a shield? Mr. Bush has promised nothing short of wiping out terrorism. But first the young president, who often seems trapped in the past, must come to grips with the modernity of evil. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |