Answering with Anger: Another Example

The foolishness of answering dire events with uncontrolled anger doesn't apply only to individuals. Large groups can be and often are even guiltier of this because their actions are much more sweeping and therefore more consequential. A good example is the response to the losses at the World Trade Center in 2001.

Four and a half years later, what do we have? What we have is nothing much of a positive nature. Instead we exist in a negative condition in which the damage wrought by Atta's men has been compounded by the very people who have called themselves ensuring that nothing of the kind will happen again while at the same time wreaking revenge on the perpetrators. U.S. civil liberties have been defiled, and the country has become even more of a prison state, at home and abroad. Numerous terror wolf tickets have been issued and bought. Numerous people have been arrested, though of course that doesn't include any of those who were actually aboard the planes and so had the strongest hand in the misdeeds, and the force that assisted them still exists, along with its most prominent figures.

In an atmosphere of mistaking the events of 9/11 for the actions of foreign governments, an outcry of "war!" shot up, and instead of making it a police responsibility, which was all that the attacks deserved for all the unexpected devastation that they caused, the seriousness was ratcheted up to an unsustainable level. Troops and machines were sent in not only to strike but also to occupy two small countries in which no one from the populations of either was among the hijackers of those airliners, and you wouldn't have found many inhabitants of bombed Kabul or bombed Baghdad who had contributed to the training of the terrorists as much as was done right here in this country, where numerous citizens, though unknowingly, helped Atta & Co. learn how to operate the liners and how to move through the American culture virtually unseen.

In that climate of blind fury members of the offending group were merely routed from one country to another, where accommodations were prepared for them by similarly routing the leadership of that second country, Iraq, as well -- much to the delight of Bin Laden and his cohorts, because they had never cared for Saddam Hussein anyway. He had been able to keep them out, whereas the Bush invasion pulled them in. Now, as a result of allowing itself to be guided more with anger than with care, the U.S. Government finds itself caught fast in not one but two quicksands Soviet-style, with not much prospect of extricating itself from either one any time soon, and with the Taliban, the Bin Laden people, and numerous other villains who have lately added themselves to the mix still alive, undaunted, active, and laughing. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise have died just yet are dead, not at the hands of the hijackers but at the hands of men who, while out hunting, are in the habit of wheeling and firing without much regard for the directions in which their weapons are pointed.