By Fe Bongolan
The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — and menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
I’m sure many of you remember Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode from 1960 called “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” In the story, when a pleasant suburban American neighborhood experiences a series of small intermittent power outages, the disruption causes the residents to degenerate into suspicion and accusation. Fear takes over, and the residents descend into full-blown panic and ultimately riot. As the ending revealed, in order to destroy human beings all it took was to disrupt basic services, let rumor and imagination run unchecked and the self-destruction of the community would do the rest.
Over forty years later — the moment that September 11 morning began, all it took was a country reeling from a violent blow, followed by the hint, the allegation, the jimmied-up evidence — to begin our decade long descent into further divisiveness and fear. Our necessary assailant was conveniently found, blame was spread over a wide swath, and fingers of suspicion pointed without corroborating evidence. All you had to be was Muslim or have a funny, foreign-sounding name. Or be a liberal.
What followed to this day has been ten years of a shrinking and distortion of our national character. Knowledge and science have become suspect. Mosques are vandalized, burned or bombed, Muslim-American children bullied in school by students and teachers. The threat of Sharia Law is bandied about in the same way Senator Joe McCarthy used the word “communist” in the 1950s. This decade, I finally understood how low we’ve descended when books appeared on the shelves lionizing Joseph McCarthy, a man whose claim to fame was the blacklisting and persecution of American socialists (liberals). And we let it happen. The monsters were no longer due. They were here all along.
Over a week has passed since May 1st and the death of Usama bin Laden, and I am still in a quandry over his death. Should we have killed him or brought him to trial? Set aside the fact that after much hoo-ha over the placement of a mosque three blocks from Ground Zero, the City of New York refused to try alleged 9-11 co-conspirator Khalid Sheikh Muhamed in a New York civilian court. Set aside the enormous burden for security costs to imprison Usama, and confronting a possible uprising his imprisonment would create in an already unstable Muslim world. Whether the death of bin Laden happened years ago and Obama put the myth to rest, or he actually killed him May 1st, 2011, my conscience is troubled as to why we did not capture and try him. This country does not seem to want the normal wheels of justice turned for the ‘devil’ himself.