Kass: "Years after 9/11, the political use of fear continues on"
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John Kass
Chicago TribuneOn the car radio they were talking about Sept. 11, 2001.
On that unspeakable day nearly 3,000 people were murdered by terrorists who slammed hijacked jets into the Twin Towers of New York City and the Pentagon, and a plane that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
There was a man in a car next to mine, with his windows rolled up. He wore a mask. But there was no one in the car with him. He was alone.
Todd Beamer was on United Airlines Flight 93, the one that crashed into a field. The terrorist hijackers had taken the jet, as they had taken others, to crash it into the White House or the Capitol in Washington. Beamer recited the Lord’s Prayer, then gathered fellow passengers who would join him in trying to retake their plane:
“Are you ready? OK, let’s roll.”
That became an anthem of American courage.
They fought to stop that plane from being used as a bomb against their nation. But mostly, Beamer and the others fought for themselves, for their lives and the chance to see their families again. When Flight 93 crashed, all aboard were killed.
Some of you don’t want to remember. But others try to remember where we were and who we were, then. Not wanting to trust memory alone, I found evidence of what was on my mind, warts and all, in a column I’d written in the hours after the towers fell:
“Time to bury dead, take care of living” was the headline.
I wrote of obligations to the living and the dead. And I worried that we’d blame all Muslim people for the terror of that day.
The young don’t remember what followed, the rise of the surveillance state, the cameras everywhere. They were too young to see the consequence of the endless, needless wars: the melding of Big Tech with big business and big government. They were too young to fathom the effect of facial recognition technology on culture. And now they use it, without a thought, to open their phones.
Up ahead, the traffic light was red. I stopped, and the man in the car next to mine looked at me with his mask on. A dog sat on the front seat next to him. The dog wasn’t wearing a mask.
But the lone driver wore one, a paper mask with a blue front, a coronavirus mask.
We wear them when going to the store and when meeting people indoors. Many of us wear them as a courtesy, so as not to frighten others around us. But the odd thing is that you often see people wearing masks alone in their cars, or alone walking a dog, scooping up the dog’s leavings in a plastic bag. Or someone masked and alone in a park, with absolutely no one within shouting distance.
You see TV reporters wearing them doing standups, outside, alone. You don’t see the sound techs without masks because they’re not on camera. Lockdown politicians who don’t want public schools open, but who send their own kids to private schools, wear masks on TV.
People in Zoom meetings, alone in a room, wear masks.
What has happened to us?
Fear happened. The expert use of fear as a goad to herd people happened.
The hope of many is that love is the real truth. As an Orthodox Christian, I cling to this idea, desperately, as it was taught to the world by the rabbi 2,000 years ago. But looking around, I see fear.
Fear of what others might say. Fear of the “woke” or not being woke enough. Fear of daring to think out loud that your kids should be in school and not staring at a screen at home.
Fear of saying the wrong thing and losing your job. Fear of being canceled out for your politics, isolated and, yes, alone.
Fear has always been the great motivator.
In the 1950s, McCarthyism from the hard right used fear of Communism to intimidate the left. The left pleaded for tolerance then, but the hard left, now ascendant in the Democratic Party, no longer worries about tolerance.
Fear has bipartisan use. After Sept. 11, the war party of the American political establishment in Washington used fear to push us into war. These people were not boastful braggarts. They were not loud and brash.
Instead, Republicans who were considered gentlemen of great public virtue took us to war by threatening us with of weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
I bought into it, too, for a time, but as a young sergeant who did multiple tours reminded me later, at least I didn’t have to leave my legs on the side of a road in Iraq.
Feminist author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing in The Wall Street Journal on the aftermath of 9/11, compares militant Islamists with the hard American left in her recent commentary, “What Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ have in common.”
Some may think her comparison much too harsh. But Hirsi Ali argues that what both sides have in common is their intolerance of dissent.
"Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate — and often glorify — violence carried out by zealots.
“The adherents of each constantly pursue ideological purity … both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist.”
It has been 19 years since the towers fell.
So much has changed since then, but one thing is constant: the political use of fear.
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@George-K said in Kass: "Years after 9/11, the political use of fear continues on":
one thing is constant: the political use of fear.
This is so true. For me, I think that the gun issue uses fear the most of current issues. Both those who are for guns and those who are against guns - fear is the reason that they have their point of view.