For real justice, we must address what fuels the anger against us.

by Claudia Montague Wheatley '80

I was brought to consciousness one morning in October by a radio report that an Osama bin Laden spokesman had declared a worldwide holy war on the United States.

"Get serious," I thought.

But the spokesman was serious. So is bin Laden. The hijackers who took out four planeloads of passengers, the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon were dead serious. If anyone isn’t serious, it is us.

It’s not that we don’t agree on the goal: the elimination of terrorism as a threat to Americans, at home and abroad. Our leaders have outlined a practical plan for identifying and eliminating terrorists and their sponsors. The problem is that while we as a nation are great at responding to crises, we’re lousy at follow-through. We enjoy the spectacle and excitement of military action. But if past experience is any indication, we do not have the patience to support the slow, careful footwork necessary to follow the money trails, build a case, choke off the network. The effort will falter and fade.

We certainly weren’t serious about preventing terrorism. Ever since the cold war ended, we’ve been warned that our next enemy would be a diffuse assortment of extremists whose style eschewed dialogue in favor of mass murder. We’ve been told that airport security is a joke, that our intelligence agencies had abandoned intelligence gathering in favor of sniping at each other, that our stockpiles of vaccine against potential biohazards were inadequate or nonexistent. Like clockwork, a series of disasters seared names like Somalia, Yemen, Oklahoma City, and Lockerbie into our brains. We did nothing.

Our leaders weren’t serious. Presented with a decade of relative peace and prosperity in which to prepare for the terrorist challenge, they spent it locked in partisan quibbles and rolling in the dirty details of the president’s sex life.

We still aren’t serious about prevention. Our leaders emphasize that routing terrorists is going to be a long, painstaking process, but we aren’t listening. Ninety percent of us supported the counterattack that began October 7, but the same Gallup poll respondents made their expectations clear: 44 percent said the whole operation should be over in a couple of months. Only 20 percent thought it might take more than a couple of years.

We aren’t serious about eradicating terrorism because we have pet causes that might get caught in the net. The United States has long been the biggest source of funding for extremist wings of the Irish Republican Army. A "right to life" activist murders a reproductive clinic doctor, and someone helps him flee the country. Our government talks about freedom and democracy but has a bad habit of cozying up to despots and tyrants. Terrorism is terrorism, but there are some sacred cows that certain groups won’t want to see dragged under that umbrella, thus weakening the public’s resolve, thus inspiring their elected representatives to weaken legislative initiatives designed to combat terrorism.

Our media aren’t serious. When CBS News announced the October 7 strikes, the graphics could have been from a football playoff. The theme? "America Fights Back" --- as if the entirety of our answer to terrorism lies in firepower and the score.

We aren’t serious about war because we haven’t the vaguest idea what it means to be involved in prolonged, all-out conflict. The "greatest generation" that fought World War II was prepped for battle by the Great Depression. Stretching rations of meat and gasoline, going without luxuries like stockings, and flattening tin cans came almost naturally to them. But, since we’re trained by Madison Avenue that we can have it "our way," our expectations are loftier. The last time a president suggested we put on a sweater and lower our thermostats to save energy, we voted him out of office so fast no one has mentioned conservation since. Warned that we were depleting our energy reserves and befouling our air, we made the gas-guzzling, hyper-polluting SUV one of the best- selling motor vehicles of all time. Drowning in garbage, we whined about mandatory recycling. Our idea of war is a TV news special, featuring lots of cool special effects, that costs few lives and is over before our attention span is strained.

The other side has an intimate relationship with war. "They know how to die," shudders a Russian veteran of the Afghan fighters who routed the Soviet Union, a former superpower. Our police and firefighters have that kind of fatalism, but as a nation we do not go gently into that good night. We send our military-age kids off to college or Canada. The idea that a person could be killed simply for reporting to work --- a given in so many parts of the world --- was news to us. School children in Kansas and Oregon had the benefit of psychological counseling although New York and Washington were a thousand and more miles away. Kids in Beirut, Jerusalem, Kabul, and Belfast play in rubble and cope with death daily, without benefit of mental health services.

We aren’t serious about our role as the last remaining superpower. We have few compunctions about using force and little regard for the people whose lives we disrupt (and sometimes end) as we pursue our aims. But we’ve decided that it’s not enough to be powerful; we want to be loved, too. We get condolences from other big, powerful nations. We take comfort in this and conclude that we are blameless victims --- heavens, there’s no need for us to do any soul-searching, much less any need for us to change.

We aren’t serious about justice. We’re looking for revenge --- a natural human impulse but crass to admit. So we cloak retribution in talk of moral and legal absolutes. If we really wanted justice, we would address the basic inequities that fuel the anger against us. We comprise less than 5 percent of the world’s population but account for nearly a third of the world’s energy consumption and a quarter of its wealth. We own a third of the motor vehicles and emit 25 percent of the greenhouse gases that change the climate for everyone. Even among our poorer citizens, our greatest health risks stem not from malnutrition but obesity. A sixth of the world’s population has to eke out existence on less than a dollar a day, or a third of the cost of a cappuccino grande. Where is the justice in that?

No one among us is campaigning to correct this imbalance. We like it when the scales are tipped in our favor. Life’s winners, we are disinclined to actively address the plight of the losers.

We are not the first immensely wealthy, enormously comfortable populace to make this mistake. Osama bin Laden and his holy warriors may live in caves and wear odd headgear, and their politics may be strictly 15th century, but they are well acquainted with 21st-century weaponry and communications strategy. Other ragtag zealots have also dreamed of toppling a prosperous, powerful, complacent enemy.

And some of them succeeded.

Claudia Montague Wheatley is an editor at Cornell University. She lives near Ithaca with her husband, Chris Wheatley ’81, and their daughter, Meg.

Photo: No luxuries here: daily mealtime at an Afghan refugee camp run by the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Photo by Ali Khaligh -- UPI Photo Service