Catching up on the news (via Internet) this morning, I’m struck again by the notion that American attitudes about our place in the world are changing rapidly. Watching 9/11 retrospectives always does this for me; I’m reminded of what a different place the world was through the late ’90s and right at the Y2K changeover (remember that term?). Who would have predicted that the real societal transition wasn’t going to happen at 1/1/00 but in the ninth month of the true first year of the 21st century.
Some people thought that the post Cold War nineties were the beginning of the “end of history“. I think the military must have subscribed to that theory–my military training (developed before 9/11 and the War on Terror–or whatever you want to call it) in early 2002 focused on MOOTW, pronounced in militaryese as “MOO-ta-wah”, an acronym for “Military Operations Other Than War” and how the American military’s main fight was isolated small involvements, generally for humanitarian reasons, overseas. Of course then, with the Afghanistan conflict already started and the Iraq War in the planning stages, our instructors did warn us that military doctrine was changing, but we still hadn’t completely shifted paradigms yet.
Of course, my thoughts lately have been more about pop culture and our society in general and our reaction to outsiders, to being at war, and things of that nature. Back on 9/10, America was flying high, albeit a little jostled by the dot-com bust, divided by the contested 2000 election, and wracked by guilt at our “sole superpower” status, based as it was on a history of (as we were taught in college) marginalization of minorities, slavery, ruthlessness of the white Europeans, and the subjugation of all that is right and good in the world. Come to think of it, these same things are still being taught now, but some people seem to have wised up to the fact that it is a party line. I hear more questions now than I did ten years ago. I even saw one nature program recently without the standard ending montage about how “the greatest predator” is evil humanity, with their pollution, brutal disregard for nature and super-evil corporations. But I digress.
Back in early 2001, no one thought that much, one way or another, about the Middle East and Americans who had roots in that part of the world. It was just the neverending Israel/Palestine peace process. They were just another ethnic group in a country replete with them. Yeah, now and then there was a movie or TV show with the “Arab terrorist” theme, though for multiculturalist reasons generally the terrorists were mid-40s white males with vaguely European accents and apparent neo-Nazi (and industrialist) aims to take over the world. But we didn’t take the threat of terrorism seriously. It seemed like an outmoded threat only carried out by redneck nutjobs.
Back in 2001, it took the second plane hitting the World Trade Center for us to realize we could be under attack. However, now the first thought most of us have during a catastrophe is that it was caused by terrorism, and not of the redneck nutjob variety. And shrill as the screams of “Islamophobia!” may be, a growing portion of our population seems to think in Us/Them terms. While we might bite our collective tongues to avoid saying something impolite or not politically correct, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to worry about the Flying Imams or the Egyptian students who disappeared (and were later found) a while back. At the same time, we feel bad that good people who have no connection with radicalism or political movements in their region of origin have to deal with people’s knee-jerk reactions to them. I’d hate it if people instinctively recoiled from and furtively watched women with a Scandinavian/Germanic heritage. I’d always have something to prove…
I think what worries our arbiters of the media and culture so much is that there is a real change in American opinions over the past 6 years. We’re developing the attitudes of a people at war, strange as that may seem in light of the widespread opposition to the war that we’re currently engaged in.
Even our lives at home now seem to be those of people who are at siege… there are constant worries about being “safe” from all sorts of threats–bacteria, pandemics, head injuries while riding bikes, aging infrastructure, availability of air evacuation if we have an accident on vacation, killer hurricanes, obesity epidemics, and the list just goes on… Somehow, we transitioned from a “Whatever!” society to a nation of timid, family-centric, “hunkered down” people who see threats in their own shadows. We’ve definitely gone from being the Masters of the Universe to feeling like Universal Targets. Which I think is a shame.
I think the problem is that we’re afraid to name the threat. We’re worried about being offensive or ethnocentric, so we diffuse our attention to all possible threats anywhere. It doesn’t help that the people in charge of most of the information that we receive would prefer for us to look anywhere else than at another culture for enemies. We should look within ourselves, or if worst comes to worst, outside at the environment (and the evil corporations), and fear, because fear sells lots of stuff. But living in perpetual fear has got to be worse than looking the enemy in the face, naming it, and going on to determine what we have to do.
And as I wrote that, I thought of the Harry Potter books. Especially of the “He Who Must Not Be Named” controversy that erupted in the last few of them. Perhaps that was what FDR was talking about when he said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” (Full speech here.)
Are we fearing fear itself, these days?
Posted by Kjirstin 
Posted by Kjirstin 
Posted by Kjirstin 
