NEW PERSPECTIVES COLUMN: In the pursuit of evil...freedom reigns
By Adam Holmberg
I was asleep when the first plane hit the North Tower. I'm due at work, at the bookstore, at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, and my mom made a mistake and got me up an hour early. After a nice warm shower, I went back to bed and woke up again at 8:15. I didn't turn the news back on. I was still groggy, so I ate breakfast and got going early.
I learned the new at 9:45. My mom, on her way to her ethics class, stopped by the bookstore and told my boss and me the news: two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon had been apparently bombed and was on fire. My boss and I kept logging on to CNN.com for the rest of the day, and we watched in horror as the story unfolded. A she said at one point, "The more news you hear, the worse it gets."
It says something when people who lived through Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassinations in the 1960s are shocked by what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. It says something when what was once comfortably fiction becomes indelible reality. It says something when only six days later seems like a lifetime.
There are few days in which one wakes up to find that the world has changed forever. American remains strong -- we responded to this disaster with such unity and precision that we shocked ourselves -- but our security blanket has been torn from us. The sentence "This is the United States; that doesn't happen here" is suddenly meaningless.
Now we go forward with a new mission -- this "new war" we have sworn to fight. We have made it our mission to wipe terrorism from the earth. No one will get in our way, and we will make no distinction, as the President said, between those that harbor the terrorists and the terrorists themselves.
I just have three admonitions:
We are the greatest country on earth because we are free. We must not, in our pursuit of evil, take away those freedoms for which we were targeted.
We must not target our Arab and Muslim citizens simply because of their race. The people who destroyed those buildings did not care who they killed as long as they killed Americans and killed many. We must make sure we separate the fanatic from the innocent.
And we must ensure that we are truly administering justice and not just bandaiding the situation. If we are to fight this war, we must fight it against all terrorists who seek to destroy us -- not just the ones who destroyed those buildings. If that means we cannot be told how our government is combating these forces of evil, so be it. It that means we must stand on shaky moral footing, so be it. Destroy these forces of evil, but do it right so what happened to the World Trade Center doesn't happen again.
Over 2,000 years ago the Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, "There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief." That is something that the families of over 6,000 missing understand all too well. That is something all of us understand too well -- the present grief of loss is magnified as we become all to aware of what we've lost forever -- our innocence.
It's amazing how quickly the world can change.