Scared is as scared does

I’m so tired of being surrounded by fear. Being afraid of spiders is one thing, sitting in our homes and fretting over the inevitable terrorist attack that our president keeps telling us is inevitable is crazy. Obviously we were sucker punched in 2001 and that was horrible. I wish we could bring all those people back. I wish our president and his people had listened to the warnings that were all around him when he took office. But their mistake doesn’t mean that we need to sit in a dark room and rock back and forth with fear.
What happened is that they screwed up. What makes it hard for me to stomach is that they can’t admit and let us forgive them. We would, you know, because that is what we do in this country. But they feel like they need to look strong and infallible in order to wage this war on terrorism. What they don’t realize is the thing we all learn as children: real strength comes in humility. Admitting our mistakes takes more character than doggedly holding onto our wrongs and trying desperately to make them right. Everyone hates that person, don’t they? Absolutely.
So I sit here and watch our administration dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole that none of us are going to be able to get out of. They are hated overseas and now they are becoming hated over here. No one likes a liar; and an arrogant one at that. When Rummi was confronted last week in Atlanta he just looked like bitter old man who is desperate to look good and not admit that he lied in order to send us to a war that we didn’t need. As Madeline Albright said, “(The Arab world) learned that if they have atomic weapons they won’t be attacked” Thanks guys.
I had a conversation with a friend today and it all tied together for me. The end result is that our countries gut reaction to this attack and allowing ourselves to live in fear has given the terrorists exactly what they wanted. A certain part of our country is willing to throw away our basic civil liberties that we fought so hard to get in order to be protected from a terrorist attack. Doing that means that the terrorists win. They are getting exactly what they want.
We have to stand up and tell them we will not lower ourselves to their level. We will not give up our belief in justice, fairness, integrity and honesty. Holding people without trial is what they do in Iran and Syria and what they used to do in Iraq. Illegal wiretapping is that they do in totalitarian regimes where they need to do whatever it takes to maintain power. Hiding the truth; standing on a podium and calling people who want to look behind the curtain traitors, smells of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and North Korea. It’s not the way that a country that honestly believes in the supremacy of their way of life acts in the face of terror.
The more they hit at us the more we need to say that we will not give in to our basest fears. We will not allow them to pull them down to their level. This country needs to hold onto our principals even harder in order to show the world that we truly are the beacon of all this is good and right in the human condition. If we don’t then it’s just a matter of time until we are just the same as they are, only doing it in the name of Jesus Christ. And that will be the most terrifying thing of all.