Financial Times - September 29, 2001
ASSAULT ON AMERICA PUBLIC MOOD: Fortitude in a fearful new world: The terror attacks on New York and Washington changed everything for Americans. Richard Tomkins takes to the streets of Middle America to gauge attitudes among a people whose faith in their invulnerability has been so badly jolted:
By RICHARD TOMKINS
It seemed such a simple question to put to the middle-aged woman sitting patiently at a bus stop in downtown Boise, Idaho. Should the US go to war over the terrorist attacks?
She opened her mouth and paused so long that it seemed possible she was unable to speak. Then a look of great sadness came into her face as, finally, she began to reply.
Her name was Carla Youngblood, and it turned out that, 10 years ago, she had been working as a federal payroll clerk at a naval air base in Virginia when the US unleashed its fury against Kuwait's Iraqi invaders in Operation Desert Storm.
"It's one thing to say what America should do, but the guys who do it have to come back," she said.
"In Desert Storm, when the guys went out on their missions, they were just in planes and didn't see what they'd done on the ground. But when the pictures came back of what they had bombed.. . Well, a lot of them turned in their wings because they couldn't deal with it.
"My ex-husband was in Vietnam. I think a lot of people don't realise what war does to a person. And kids today are more gentle than when I grew up in the 1960s: they haven't really seen any bad things, except on TV.
"I don't say they will refuse to fight. But when they come back, it's going to be so hard on them."
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On the question of how the US should respond militarily to the attacks, Middle Americans show a remarkable resilience in holding on to their humanity even as they must be tempted to succumb to the lust for a terrible revenge.
Whether in the quaint, picture-postcard town of Madison in the old south, the sprawling Midwest city of St Louis, Missouri, or the Idaho state capital of Boise nestling against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, most people want to see not a devastating display of America's military might, but a carefully targeted response that singles out the terrorists for punishment while minimising the loss of further lives.
In St Louis, Captain Pat O'Mally, a pilot for the Trans World Express regional airline, says the rest of the world may see the US as a McDonald's culture craving instant gratification, "but just to go out there and drop a nuke on the Mideast - that's wrong, that's terrorism, everyone understands that. We don't want to become terrorists ourselves."
Some take a harsher line. Robert Farmer, a construction worker on a road crew in St Louis's University City Loop, says if the guilty parties are located, they should be bombed whether or not civilians get in the way. "They weren't thinking about our civilians when they attacked us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Others, such as Stacey Thomas, a St Louis day care provider, say the loss of civilian lives is inevitable if action is taken against the terrorists. "Very rarely do you have your nice little fanatics all sitting there in a cute little group just waiting their turn. That's just not realistic.
"There needs to be action because that's the way it works: someone acts on you and you act back. But it's not clean, it's not sterile, and there's no getting away from the messiness of it all."
Most, however, urge caution on the nation's political leaders. "We need to do something, because otherwise you're sending a signal to the world that they can do anything and we will just turn away," says Larry Massey, an insurance agent in Madison.
"But we need to be very careful. We need to learn a lesson from Russia (in Afghanistan) that we didn't learn from the French (in Vietnam)" - meaning that the US should prefer commando raids and targeted action to a full-scale invasion and an "old-style war with lots of troops".
Daniel Schaeffer, an off-duty cab driver in St Louis, says if the US inflicts heavy civilian casualties, "that would rebound on us because we would end up looking every bit as bad as bin Laden does, which may be exactly what he wants. When you're dealing with a man like bin Laden, you have to be very careful not to play into his hands."
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"I don't know what the answer is. There's the military one. But you have to have a plan for the aftermath, after you've punished those terrorists. There has to be a plan to change things, otherwise it's just going to swell up again and get worse."
He has a point. When somebody hates you and wants to kill you, there are a couple of ways you can stop them. In the short term, an obvious one is to kill them before they can get to you. Longer-term, a less red-blooded alternative may be to ask why they hate you and see if there is anything that can be done about it.
If there is ever a right time for the appeasement of terrorists, this is certainly not it. Even so, in the days since September 11, the US media have tentatively tried to fathom what motivated the attacks in articles and broadcasts asking: "Why do they hate us so much?"
Ask that question of many Americans, and the answer is a look of blank incomprehension. In spite of the global perspective and worldliness of America's business, academic and media elite, most Americans have never travelled abroad - 85 per cent do not hold passports - and their knowledge of affairs outside the US tends to be limited.
Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, says the US media reflect this insularity by saturating Americans with "junk news" about shark bites, forest fires, tropical storms and the activities of minor celebrities, leaving them ignorant about international affairs.
"You are dealing here with people who are almost child-like as a nation in their understanding of what is going in the world," Celente says. "It's all: 'We never did anything to anybody, so why are they doing this to us?'"
Certainly, if the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were trying to make a point, they failed. Few people in Middle America admit to any clear sense of what lay behind the terrorists' hatred.
"I don't understand what they dislike so much about the US. I wish that was publicised more," says Marie Herrick, a Madison debt collector. "I never even knew about bin Laden before all this happened, yet they say he was bombing some of our embassies in Africa and so on. I'm sure lots of people had never heard of him, and I want to know why it's suddenly become such a big thing."
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Ultimately, it all seems to come down to the "F" word: freedom, the foundation on which American society was built. Because Americans value freedom so highly, their instinctive assumption when they are directly attacked is that someone is trying to take it away. "Freedom and fear are at war," declared President George .W Bush in his address to Congress last week.
Nearly all Middle Americans seem to share that sense of freedom under attack. In the absence of any other obvious reason for the atrocities, they assume those responsible are on a mission to impose their alien ideologies on the US.
Beth Davis, a legal secretary secretary in Madison, says: "I think it has to do with their religious beliefs. They hate us for what we are because we are a free, democratic country which has freedom of worship."
Pat Balk, a geographic information systems technician in St Louis, says: "They want their vision of Islam to conquer everything else. They can't stand our state of freedom.
"Here's the big difference: they put their ideology before human life, and we put human life above ideology. For us, free will governs everything else."
A problem that some Middle Americans are wrestling with is that if freedom and fear are the antithesis of each other, an increase in fear means a decrease in freedom. So to the extent that Americans are more fearful, their liberty has already been eroded.
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Meanwhile, freedom is not just at war with fear, but with the possibility that Americans will see their civil liberties eroded in the name of greater security. Anti-terrorism legislation already proposed by the White House would extend the government's powers to tap into people's private communications and give the government the ability to detain or expel immigrants not for their acts, but for their associations. There is talk of ethnic and racial profiling, too.
This worries Larry Massey, the St Louis insurance agent. "Every time we have a problem, the federal government sets about restricting the liberties of the citizenry," he says. "I don't want to be told that I can't come and go as I please, and while I don't carry a gun, I still don't like the idea of being told I can't have one."
He also draws the line at allowing greater surveillance of people's internet or cellphone activity, saying there have been too many tales of "profiling people and harassing them because of their profiles and not because they have committed a crime".
In this respect, though, he finds himself in a minority. Most Middle Americans seem to think a little more intrusion into their private lives is a price worth paying if it brings them greater security.
"If you're innocent, it's not going to bother you, and if you're guilty, you deserve to get caught," says a woman in St Louis - although paradoxically, of all the people interviewed, she is the only one who declines to be identified.
Has the US fallen for a trick? Is it quietly yielding to greater authoritarianism as a result of the attacks, playing into the hands of the terrorists who would destroy its freedom?
"No, I don't see this as the beginning of a slide into totalitarianism. People in the west are too used to thinking for themselves," says Daniel Schaeffer, the cab driver. And Pat O'Mally, the pilot, puts his faith in the constitution. "We will never have an authoritarian system - there are too many checks and balances. That will never happen in America."
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As befits the most optimistic people on earth, some Americans look for a positive side to the shock that has followed the terrorist attacks. Gail Slane, a nurse at a Boise rehabilitation hospital, says: "It brings people together when something like this happens. I think people will be more caring towards one another, they will be closer, and they will be checking each other more, at least for a time."
Sherm Weidner, a systems analyst in Boise, believes the US may become more generous and compassionate as a nation. "We have had a tendency to be pretty self-centred and smug about our position.
"God gave us an amazing country with an awful lot of resources, and we haven't shared them as adequately as we ought."
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