Victory Is in Saying No to Fear

Years ago, as a tourist in Vienna, I met an old lady who called herself “the Prinzessin” and claimed to be a Hapsburg princess, now reduced to the status of tour guide. Among her collection of overpolished anecdotes was an item about complaining to her mother one day during her childhood that life was boring. “The next day,” she said, “we heard that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot.” Pause for effect. “And life was never boring anymore.”

The notion that there are days when history swings on a pivot is irresistible and, to some extent, valid. The shooting of the archduke that started World War I, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination. Before: innocence and sun-dappled lawns. Afterward: knowledge, modernity and darkness.

Will Sept. 11, 2001, really turn out to have been one of those days? A horrible day, certainly, and yes, a day that will live in infamy. But a day when life changed dramatically and permanently for everyone, at least in America? Maybe so, but there are adequate reasons to doubt and excellent reasons to avoid leaping to that conclusion.

For the journalists and politicians we depend on for the official cliche of our national conversation, the apocalyptic note is irresistible. It’s just the nature of journalism to make “this is more important than you think” a subtext of every story. And when you’ve devalued concepts such as “crisis” and “war,” as TV news especially has done in recent years, apocalypse is about all you have left when a story this big comes along.

As for pols, they are also natural hyperbolizers who are not disposed to conclude that a national crisis is smaller than it seems. Although logic doesn’t really matter in such things, there is a logical contradiction among the official cliches of the moment that “everything has changed.”

Victory in the war against terrorism consists precisely of everything not changing. If life has changed permanently and dramatically for the worse, terrorism has won the war. If people become convinced that, say, getting on an airplane is wildly riskier than they previously thought, terrorism has won whether that is true or not.

“Everything has changed” can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of the economy, where consumer confidence matters a lot more than the direct costs of terrorism itself. Being told again and again that life from now on will be unrecognizable doesn’t make me want to rush out to Wal-Mart.

Certainly, it’s ironic that so many Americans seem convinced that life was wonderful until last week and will be terrible from now on. For more than a decade, the mantra of U.S. politics was “change.” Voters demanded it, politicians of all stripes promised it. For thousands of Americans directly affected by the attack, life has indeed changed tragically. But for most of us, it’s at worst too early to say whether everyday life will be permanently and dramatically altered. And there’s something self-indulgent about assuming so.

While flag-waving is an appropriate and moving response to a frontal attack on our country, there are a couple of wrong notes in the current national chorus. One, of course, is bullying, which is always the underside of patriotism.

More novel, disturbing and, I’m afraid, more characteristic, is the theme of victimization. Oh, poor us. We need grief counseling and little ribbons to wear. Those ribbons claim membership and ask for sympathy more than they communicate resolve. We share the pain of actual victims not just through empathy and financial generosity but also by feeling victimized. How long before some doctor discovers a Sept. 11 syndrome.

In the case of a president who must suddenly rally people to an unexpected cause, a bit of hyperbole is understandable. The danger for George Bush is that he is promising total victory when that is not possible or even, in a way, necessary.

Terrorism is not “an enemy” that can be defeated. It is infinite tactics available to any enemy. Particular enemies can be defeated and terrorism in general can be discouraged, but the possibility can never be eliminated.

Life was riskier than we realized before Sept. 11 and is not as risky as we fear now. Resisting the conclusion that everything has changed is one way to help prevent it from being true.