Turrorists
As a young boy growing up in Pennsylvania in the 60s, I was scared to death of Communists. They were everywhere. They were putting flouride in our water, stealing our rocket science and waiting to "bury" us as Nikita Krushchev infamously said.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, dreaming about a nuclear holocaust caused by the missiles sitting just 70 miles off our coast. This point was reinforced on the many occasions that I would be hunched over at my school desk, staring at my own crotch waiting for the all-clear signal and hoping that this was another drill and not the real thing.
Communists.
Ugh. And just in case we didn't know what would happen after the bombs dropped, hollywood was happy to tell us. The aftermath of radiation was...GIANT INSECTS and LIZARDS with firebreath. They would emerge from their volcano and head for their natural food source--skyscrapers.
Communists were everywhere in the 60s.
Terrorists are everywhere now.
They're under every bed, riding on every plane, working at every 7-11. They are after our power plants, our water supplies and most importantly our oil.
9/11 was a tragedy of Olympian proportions and the perpetrators should be caught and hung. There seems to be a surprising lack of effort to do so, however.
The bogey man of the new millenia is the terrorist. Simply saying the words "National Security" is enough to justify almost anything, from rolling back a hundred years of civil liberties to torturing suspects because they might be "turrorists". The means justify the ends when the enemy looms sufficently large in one's own mind.
Perhaps some of us miss the good old days when we had a common enemy to rally the people around. It's not much of a stretch to replace one ethnic group with another. "Communist" and "Terrorist" even rhyme.
As a parent, I know that children mature when they can look and assure themselves that there's no bogeyman hiding under the bed. It's high time for America to wake up and shed some light on our fears. Daylit villains are never as bad as shadowy nightmares.
Posted on December 09, 2005
