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The full impact takes a moment to sink in: A smiling
girl, perhaps 5, perches on a man’s shoulder. She mugs for the
camera, flashing a V sign. Is it for victory? Peace? Or is it
nothing more than a child’s clowning?
The photo looks as if it might have been snapped on an outing to
the city. They could be any father and daughter enjoying a day
together, if it weren’t for the flags and the posters – and the mock
explosives strapped to the girl’s waist. The scene was a
rally in Berlin, though there have been similar demonstrations
elsewhere.
Most Americans would agree that the world has become an increasingly
dangerous and disturbing place. This may be true, for Americans at
least, but how much so depends on your world.
In the early 1980s I spent a few weeks in Liberia,
months after a coup crushed Africa’s oldest continuous government
and shortly before civil war killed or displaced a million people.
I visited Chile five years later at the height of unrest
accompanying the final days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Both
countries were under martial law, which was a somewhat fuzzy concept
for me at the time. It became much clearer after an innocent
comment to a soldier brought a shove against a bus and an Uzi aimed
at my midsection.
In 1996 I toured Pakistan, India, and Nepal, just as the
Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan and Maoist rebels in Nepal began
their struggles for power. The region was relatively quiet, though
Pakistan has since been at the hub of our war with terrorism and
near the brink of nuclear war with India. The Nepalese insurgents
have killed dozens in recent months, a tragedy buried by headlines
from the Middle East.
Aside from the fact that I should never under any
circumstances be consulted for vacation advice, the main thing I
have taken away from my travels is an appreciation for how safe we
Americans are. Even now, just months after the September 11
attacks, we fill the malls, attend sporting events, travel by air,
and generally go about our business as if nothing had happened.
We may not have that luxury for long; there are too many
forces that want to make us as miserable as they are. And while our
routines may be back to normal, we do have a national case of the
heebie-jeebies, a sense of something about to happen. Perhaps not
enough to make most change their habits, but it’s not hard to sense
the edginess.
The photo from Berlin shows why. The American
experience does not prepare us to understand a man who would make
his point by threatening to kill civilians at random, much less one
who would visually promise to blow up his daughter to do it.
We like to believe everything can be negotiated, that anyone can be
reasoned with if you just find the proper angle, make the correct
compromise, or do the right thing. We like win-win scenarios, where
everyone gets at least part of what they want. Yet where would one
start with the man in the photo?
We are a diverse people, in faith, ethnicity, and politics. Our
differences get ugly, but we have not allowed the level of
sustained, institutionalized brutality that remains a fact of life
in much of the world.
Still, does a culture that has come to see tolerance as
a virtue in itself, which is reluctant to call one thing right and
another wrong, have the moral courage to not accept excuses for the
tactics of terror? If we lack the character to make value
judgments, our unequalled wealth and might will amount to squat
against the man in the photo and those like him. |
