by John Robbins

When there is as much terror afoot as there has been since September 11th, it is hard to see how love might prevail.

This is how it is with us human beings when we are afraid: We contract. Our breathing becomes shallow and constricted. Concerns for our immediate survival push everything else out of the picture. In the throes of terror, our thinking is narrowed and short-term. The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who are threats and those who can help us defend against the threat. Everyone else is seen as irrelevant, and might as well not exist. All our attention is focused on protecting ourselves from the immediate danger. Our thoughts become dominated by "fight or flight," triggering the reptilian part of our brain to take over. If we can't successfully flee, then we must fight. It's kill or be killed. Nothing else matters.

That's the mindset of terror. That's what fear does to us. It's a state of consciousness that's been widespread in our nation since the horrifying and tragic attacks of September 11th.

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by Molly Ivins

NEW YORK -- It now looks, with 20-20 hindsight, as though he should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar-baby that is Afghanistan. We're running out of time for three reasons--winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.

We've run out of time to set up a bridge or coalition government and so, of necessity, are throwing our lot with the Northern Alliance. According to the Afghan women's organization, the Northern Alliance is as bad as the Taliban and, in addition, consists of minority tribes who have always warred with the majority Pashtun.

The trick to smiting back those who smote us is to first figure out where they are. This means using creative diplomacy and plain police work. We need to hit them without killing the innocents around them and, as Texas populist Jim Hightower observes, that calls for a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. If it takes years, it takes years.

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by Jerry Kloby

The attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11 andthe subsequent discovery of infections from both cutaneous and inhalationanthrax have heralded a new era of fear for American citizens. They alsomark a significant change in war-making. It is a war that deliberatelytargets American civilians, uses biological weapons of mass destruction,and in which the enemy is largely unknown and not clearly linked to a singlenation-state.

The fear and apprehension that is accompanying this new threat is understandable,but it is eliciting a reaction on the part of the United States that isnot likely to produce positive results, a fact that is becoming clearerday by day.

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by Rachel Giese

As a loyal member of one of the world's most disliked professions, I can't go as far as a friend who recently declared that "you just can't trust the media," but I sympathize with her frustration.

In a post-O.J., post-Monica culture, where every car chase and stained dress merits 'round the clock coverage and a four-pundit debate, it seems the more media you consume, the less informed and more terrified you are.

The rise of 24-hour news channels — the alphabet soup of CNN, MSNBC, CTVN and CP24 — has necessitated a hyperactive, obsessive style of news delivery that fills the screen with stock quotes, weather forecasts, traffic updates, entertainment gossip and news bites.

The incessant news delivery elevates insignificant events (remember all those pre-Sept. 11 shark attack stories?), trivializes events of importance and results in news that is often inaccurate, insufficient or alarmist.

Case in point is a story that CNN jumped all over on the night of Sept. 11.

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by John Borowski

Every time I look at that flag waving in front of my house, I hum the words to “God Bless America,” particularly the phrase, “Stand beside her, and guide her.” That flag is not to be flown in a time of being “patriotically correct”; rather it represents democratic values and morals and demands that all citizens live out the creed “Liberty and Justice for All.”

I want peace, yet I will not deny that I support a search-and-destroy mission against the terrorists. Not the bombing of stone-age villages and their inhabitants. My cousin, a transit cop in New York, and a brother-in-law were on site when the towers collapsed, and I want justice for innocent blood that was spilled that day. Thank God, they both survived.

Yet the events of Sept. 11 have brought out a dark side of this nation, where opportunists seek to use this event to quiet those who seek to defend civil liberties and the democratic values that make this a country I would die for.

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By Tim Wise

To hear those who support the current air assault on Afghanistan tell it, those of us who doubt the likely efficacy of such a campaign, and who question its fundamental morality are not only insufficiently patriotic but dangerously naïve. Lampooning the left for adhering to such ostensibly simplistic slogans as "violence begets violence," these self-proclaimed pragmatists insist that sometimes massive force is necessary and that in the case of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, little else could possibly serve to diminish the threat of terrorist attack.

It takes me back, all this self-assured confidence in the value of preemptive assault. To 1986 in particular, when a co-worker of mine insisted that although our bombing of Libya had failed to kill Colonel Quadafi, that by killing his daughter we had nonetheless served the cause of peace. After all, said my co-worker, she was destined to become a terrorist someday, so better to kill her before she grew. That others might be able to apply the same logic to Americans -- who, after all, could grow up to be Elliot Abrams -- was lost on her, as she was convinced the world had been made safer that day.

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