Roger Rosenblatt
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- IN the last year and throes of the Soviet Union, I was strolling around Moscow with a university teacher whom I was interviewing. As we walked, on a bright blue September Sunday, I noticed that the people we passed were staring at me--lots of people, with a sort of scientific intensity. I asked my companion, Did I look so different from ordinary Russians that I stood out as an object of curiosity? She responded almost blithely, "You don't look afraid. Americans don't look afraid."
It was true, of course. And it was the first time I was made aware of this oddity in the American makeup. All other countries and cultures have been given good reason to know and show fear. But until lately, historically blessed America has sauntered about fear free.
On Sept. 11, an easy-gaited people became a shadowed figure looking over its shoulder.
Cervantes said "fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies." He was really referring to that transitional state when fear, which is a sober and potentially useful attitude, becomes something out of control and wildly dangerous.
One of the things fear of the unspecified does is to broaden and shrink the context of one's life simultaneously. Because of Sept. 11, one is made jarringly aware of living in the wider world, and one's private vanities are properly discarded. At the same time, because that wider world means menace, one is also spooked into blanket-over-the-head thinking. Should I sit in a crowd at a ball game? Send the kids to school? Go down to the kitchen?
Unlike the Russians among whom I walked--and who lived with unspecific fear so long they incorporated it into a black comedic vision--Americans are not afraid of their country. But we are starting to be afraid of living in our country. However united one may feel about our war against terror, fear of the unspecific is divisive. Terrorism threatens to take away one's sense of country; thus it instills an every-man-for-himselfness that makes it more difficult to win the war.
But the worst thing unspecific fear can do is to seep into the bloodstream so that all of life is poisoned, and even in those moments when nothing is going wrong--sweet moments with family, walks in the park--one feels that life is on the verge of a mad explosion. For the entirety of its existence, Israel has lived with the fear of terrorism, and learned to alchemize that fear into resolve.
So I asked an Israeli, Professor Moshe Halbertal, who is visiting at the
University of Pennsylvania law school, how we Americans should be
dealing with our sudden unwanted education. And he told me that the
way to prevent fear from becoming panic is to hold onto one's sense of
order in the face of the chaos the terrorist seeks to create. "Panic is
unspecified, untargeted anxiety," he said, "not channeled to place and
time. The terrorist seeks to be unspecific to place and time, even to his
own enmity. He wants to make everyone appear the enemy." This is
why, he said, military attacks against the Taliban regime are
psychologically useful as well as strategically correct. "There is a
target."
JWR contributor Roger Rosenblatt, a columnist for TIME, he has earned a Peabody, an Emmy, a Fulbright Scholarship, two George Polk Awards, and awards from the American Bar Association and Overseas Press Club. His latest book is Rules for Aging: Resist Normal Impulses, Live Longer, Attain Perfection. Comment by clicking here.
