They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. We can tell ourselves that whatever we've done to inspire bitterness, distrust and rancour, it was not so damnable as to bring this day down on our heads. The sense of disarticulation we hear in the term "Us and Them" has never been so striking, at either end. But there is no defenceless human at the end of his gaze. He knows who we are and what we mean in the world - an idea, a righteous fever in the brain. Years here, waiting, taking flying lessons, making the routine gestures of community and home, the credit card, the bank account, the post-office box. This is his edge, that he does not see her. They share the codes and protocols of their mission here and something deeper, a vision of judgment and devastation.ĭoes the sight of a woman pushing a stroller soften the man to her humanity and vulnerability, and her child's as well, and all the people he is here to kill? At a certain point he and his brothers may begin to feel less motivated by politics and personal hatred than by brotherhood itself. The terrorist shares a secret and a self. This is not the self-watcher, the soft white dangling boy who shoots someone to keep from disappearing into himself. He lives a certain kind of apartness, hard and tight. He builds a plot around his anger and our indifference. The terrorist, planted in a Florida town, pushing his supermarket trolley, nodding to his neighbour, lives in a far narrower format. We live in a wide world, routinely filled with exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and expressible feeling. This is the edge they have, the fire of aggrieved belief. We are rich, privileged and strong, but they are willing to die. OUR tradition of free expression and our justice system's provisions for the rights of the accused can only seem an offence to men bent on suicidal terror. The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past. Whatever acts of violence marked the protests, most of the men and women involved tend to be a moderating influence, trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future. The protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle and other cities want to decelerate the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of consumer-robots and social instability, with the chance of self-determination probably diminishing for most people in most countries. Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage. This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years. It is our lives and minds that are occupied now. Terror's response is a narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable.
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