----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema" <crdbronx at erols.com>
There is another way of thinking realistically about these events and the response without falling into romantic moralism, which is the typical American reaction. It is to ask, explicitly or implicitly, "Don't we want to be safe in the future? Isn't it wise and prudent to know and understand the people and problem we confront?" It is at least as legitimate to question the emotive response that experiences the effort at causal understanding as somehow demeaning to the victims of crime. Since then I've found many people receptive to the argument that Bush's talk of "war" is not a practical response, not likely to make us safer, and very probably will not even result in capturing Osama bin Laden, assuming that they can prove him to have really been a culprit. This are all practical arguments that go straight to the concern for safety and security in the United States. It is possible to make them without seeming to condemn ordinary Americans. The common feeling of alienation from government means that it is easy to criticize Washington without in any way asserting that "you killed your dead loved ones by voting in this government."
I have been making this kind of argument for a long time, usually about issues of personal violence. In essence the conventional argument about "bad" or "evil" people involves defensive fantasies about the sources of badness or evil being apart from any experiences one can personally imagine, especially from inner experiences of the self. Religious people imagine the source of evil in explicitly supernatural terms. People who are not so traditionally religious tend still to respond to their anxiety with less formally magical thinking.
At the same time, most people are in a degree of conflict about these matters, and really are open to the argument that we can best satisfy the desire for safety, security, day-to-day well being by using our heads.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema