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                              Stuck In Traffic
            "Current Events, Cultural Phenomena, True Stories"
                         Issue #39 - October 2001
         Current Events:
         "Grasping The Evil" by Calvin Powers
         
         "At War With Peace" by Lee Haslup
         
         "The Front Line" by Calvin Powers
 
 
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                     Current Events
Grasping The Evil
by Calvin Powers

Twenty-four hours after the terrorist attacks in New York and D.C., I
was still trying to grasp the scope of the evil. I was at work when the
news of the first attack occurred on the World Trade Center. A friend
and I ran to the nearest PC and pulled up CNN.com. News had not spread
much yet, so we could still get to the web site. Sure enough, there was
the World Trade Center with a big gaping hole in it and smoke pouring
out. We both immediately noted that the hole was in the dead center of
the tower. "No one tried to avoid the tower," I told my friend and he
agreed.

We went about our work in the office and soon after we heard about the
second attack on the World Trade Center. At that point, work came to a
halt. Everyone was swapping news tid bits. My friend, who is in the
National Guard, started calling folks he knew and swapping instant
messages with folks he knew in the guard and other places. We heard
about the Pentagon attack, we heard about the scare at the state
department. At the time we heard there were bombs on the Washington Mall
and the Capitol, which later turned out to be false alarms. But at the
time we didn't know.

And through those first few hours, I was very detached from it all. For
unrelated reasons, the phones were out in our building that day, so we
were somewhat cut off from family and friends. Websites were clogged up
so bad that we couldn't hook in to the live news feeds. So he had to get
our news in bits and pieces as one person or another managed to access a
news web site.

About lunch time I received an e-mail from one of my co-workers who was
off-site. He needed me to call him. Well, the office phones were out and
my mobile phone can't hold a signal at the office, so I decided I'd go
out for lunch so I could call him from the mobile. Naturally, I turned
on our local news talk radio when I got in the car. That's when I
started to get a sense of just how much evil had been inflicted on
innocent people.

I forget the exact order of events at this point. I remember listening
to news reports that all the airports were being shut down. But what
really impressed me was a news reporter there in Manhattan trying to
describe the mass exodus of people out of the area. She said all the
subways had been shut down. She said there were no cabs. She said that
there was no public transportation whatsoever and that thousands and
thousands of people were heading north on foot. That's the image that
started making me realize just how bad the scene was.

I went in to a nearby restaurant and ate lunch and made my phone call.
The building collapses must have happened about then or shortly after I
got back to the office. For the afternoon I was sort of in denial. I
went about my business. I avoided the news sites for the most part. I
knew I'd be spending all night watching TV and that's exactly what I did
when I got home. I saw the videos of the second plane crashing into the
World Trade Center. I saw the video of the buildings collapsing. And
still I could not quite grasp the magnitude of it all. It looked too
much like bad special effects in a movie. I had heard that on an average
day, around 50,000 people were in that World Trade Center building.
“Impossible,” I thought. When you think about it, a skyscraper is a
marvel. You have to get fresh air to all those people. You have to get
water to all those people. You have to haul them up and down over 100
stories and they all want to come in and leave at relatively close to
the same time.

I have this vague recollection of walking down a tall stairwell sometime
in the past, for a fire drill or something. So I could imagine all those
people in the World Trade Center choking the stair wells trying to get
out. The scary thing is that at the uper levels you go down the stairs
fairly quickly. But the lower you get the slower everything moves and
it's frightening because the progress is so slow and if you needed to
move quickly, you know you couldn't.

The reports of people who made it out of the building seem to indicate
that there was no panic in the stair wells of the World Trade Center,
which is as much a heroic act as anything else. Remaining civilized in
the face of danger is a true test. It's easy to be civilized when things
are going well; the true test is remaining civilized in the face of
danger.

I saw the other video images. I saw the pictures of people trapped in
the upper floors, standing at the windows looking out. I can only
imagine their terror. I saw the images of people jumping tens of
stories. I can't imagine how bad it would get to force someone into
thinking that jumping seemed like any sort of option.

No officials interviewed would comment on how many people they thought
had lost their lives at any of the attack sites. But you could tell
right away that the number was going to be in the thousands. Maybe the
tens of thousands. Late the first night, union officials announced that
over 250 fire fighters were missing and over 70 police officers were
missing. Through all this, I still could not grasp that level of evil. I
could hear the numbers. I could see the video, but I couldn't comprehend
it all. I'm lucky in the sense that as far as I know, I have no personal
connection to any of the victims. And as far as I know, none of my
extended family or friends had connections to any of the victims. So I
was somewhat detached from it all. I was trying, really trying, to feel
the impact of the day's events and I just wasn't getting it. It was too
big to comprehend.

I told myself I had to start small. 

All of the airplanes in the United States had been grounded. My
brother-in-law, who lives in Dallas found himself stranded in Los
Angeles on business. At the time we had no idea how long the FAA was
going to keep everything shut down, so he had rented a car and was
starting the long trek back to Dallas. Well, that's something that's
small enough that I could sort of grasp the impact of it. On Monday I
had ordered some books from Amazon.com. "When am I going to get my
books?" I wondered. That sounds trite in light of the tragedy. But it
was the only personal impact I could immediately feel so I had to start
there.

All of the airplanes in the United States were grounded and I was not
going to get my books from Amazon.com and my brother-in-law was going to
have to drive half way across the country. Occasionally I have periods
in my job where I have to travel so I have some experience with
airports. I could remember back to past trips where I walked through
crowded airports and then I tried to imagine those airports totally
empty. No travel through them. That started to hit home for me. What
about the mail? How was mail going to get through? What about companies
like UPS and Federal Express? How were they going to do their jobs? Then
I started hearing on the news about this and that sporting event being
canceled. And it made sense to me because if you can't travel to the
game, you can't have it. And large crowds of people at a football
stadium, for example, are easy targets for terrorists. Thinking about
these things, I started getting a good sense of the nationwide scope of
the situation. Major transportation halted. Wall Street closed. I could
imagine just how fouled up the economy was going to be for a while. I
could imagine shortages in stores and briefly felt a tinge of panic that
maybe I should go stock up on food or something.

Of course that would be totally pointless. But finally, in some small
way, it was starting to sink in with me.

But I still hadn't come to grips with the number of people that had lost
their lives that day. Based on news reports about certain people having
started on the the 40th floor and taking 40 minutes to get out of the
building. I figured there were still a large percentage of folks still
in the building that had died. And this isn't even counting the people
that had been on the floors that were hit by the planes or the poor
folks trapped in the floors above. I don't know how I did the math, but
I figured in my head that there could easily have been 10,000 people
still in the building when it collapsed. I hope that my estimate is way
too high. It was leaked that the state of New York asked the federal
government for nearly 20,000 body bags. As I write these words, the
count of “missing” people is around 4700. But they've only been
compiling lists for about 24 hours. I tried to imagine my co-workers
gone. The people on my hallway. Then the people in my building. I work
for IBM, which employs about 10,000 people in the Raleigh/Durham area.
So I tried to imagine every single one of them gone and their families
mourning their loss. I work in a building that's away from the main
complex of buildings. But I've walked through the winding hallways of
the buildings at the main site. So I could sort of imagine that every
single one of the offices in every single one of the buildings being
empty because the person that worked there had been suddenly killed.
This started to work for me. I could start to understand the sheer
numbers of it all.

The scene that affected me the most though, the image that finally poked
through the denial and numbness I was feeling, was the scene of
relatives wandering around Manhattan looking for their loved ones.

They all do about the same thing. They hold up hand made posters and
pictures of their missing loved ones and wander from one hospital to the
next looking for their spouse, their children, their friends. And
there's practically no one at the hospitals, at least compared to the
number of people missing. And there are scores, maybe hundreds, of
volunteer doctors from all over the country with precious little to do
because there are so few survivors. And still these people wander around
the city, hoping to find some sort of information about their loved
ones. The news organizations interview them quite a bit because at this
point, they're not much going on at ground-zero.

As I write this, there are several buildings surrounding the World Trade
Center complex that are in danger of falling, so they rescue workers
have to be very careful about not becoming victims themselves and not
many can be in the main “ground zero” zone at a time. A few blocks away,
an army of thousands of doctors, fire fighters, volunteers, and
specialists are waiting to get to work, but they can't. So the news
organizations interview these desperate human beings trying to find
their loved ones. And they all behave just the same. They are calm.
They're not hysterical. They absolutely refuse to give up hope. They are
obviously exhausted. They are obviously running on adrenaline. And yet
they will look straight into the camera and describe their loved one as
if they are filing a missing person's report and hold up a picture to
the camera.

"If anyone has any information about this person, please, please call."

Those are the images that finally got through to me. Those are the
images that broke through the numbness and denial. Those are the images
that finally, finally made me recognize the scope of the evil. Those are
the images that broke my heart.

As if no one knows where the missing people are.
 
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                         Current Events
 "At War With Peace"
 by Lee Haslup


My friend, Lee Haslup, wrote this letter to Joe Sobran, in response to
his syndicated article about the World Trade Center Attacks.


Mr Sobran,

I have been an admirer of your writing for some years. I have several of
your books (Single Issues being a favorite) and I read your column
fairly regularly on the World Wide Web. I usually agree with you on most
issues but I am not sure your September 11th column was, shall we say,
your most persuasive piece.

When one sets out the oppose the growth of the modern State one should
bear in mind why, exactly, it should be opposed. For me, the reason that
makes the most sense is that the modern State prevents people from
living their lives properly, not by oppressing them, but by distracting
them. As a third party in every transaction it distracts people when
they face a problem, tempting them to shift the solution to the
political realm rather than confronting it themselves. Faced with
millions of demands the State will do this and that, sometimes helpful,
more often unhelpful, but the bad results of the unhelpful actions of
the State add up to very little compared to the vast number of problems
that were not addressed by the people involved. The real damage comes
not from the actions of the State but from the inaction of people in its
thrall.


There is a Libertarian version of this error. When faced with a
difficult problem the errant libertarian will assume that it is the
result of actions by the State and seek to correct it by demanding that
the State cease some action that they feel is harmful. Since most
actions of the State are to some extent harmful our Libertarian will, in
many cases, be partially correct, but if he allows himself to be
distracted from confronting the problem by the presence of the State
then he makes the same mistake as the statist. The statist and the
doctrinaire anti-statist both overestimate the power of the state to
make matters better or worse in the lives of its people. They both
respond to problems by twiddling with the knobs on the same useless
machine, differing only on which way they should be turned.

I think your September 11th column focuses too much on the, admittedly
counterproductive, actions of the US government and understates the
importance of cultural differences in the motivation of the attacks on
the World Trade Center. It is not military imperialism that the
attackers cannot tolerate -- the odd flurry of cruise missiles now and
then, bridges bombed, airstrips cratered, aspirin factories pulverized
-- it is cultural attack -- the constant barrage of alien images, songs,
ideas, fashions, attitudes -- that they cannot bear. They seek to stem
the insidious flow of western influence by polarizing relations between
our world and theirs. They are deliberate enemies of tolerance. They are
at war with peace.

In your column you say they do not hate us for our virtues. I think they
do. Certainly they hate us for things we think of as virtues. Many of
these "virtues" are overstated or dubious but others are quite real. War
is the health of the State and these are good times to check the chains
we have put on our leviathan, but we are foolish to think that we are
facing an enemy who would wish peaceful interaction with our people
absent provocation by our government.

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                         Current Events
The Front Line
by Calvin Powers

Let's face it. We were caught by surprise. Who in their deepest darkest
fears could have imagined the World Trade Center going down in flames,
taking with it over 5000 human lives, including hundreds of heroic
rescue workers, police officers, and especially fire fighters? It's been
a living nightmare that can't be made to go away by turning on the
lights.

It's easy to blame the government. Someone should have known. The CIA.
The FBI. The NSA. The Congress should have been funding this and that
program better. National security wasn't what it should have been.
Domestic security wasn't what it should have been. Airport security
wasn't what it should have been. This list goes on and on.

But the fact of the matter is that we, as a nation, as individuals, were
caught terribly by surprise. With one exception, we didn't defend
ourselves against the attack. The hijackers that appeared to be
targeting Camp David were foiled by oe exceptional group of heroic
passengers who literally gave their lives trying to foil the hijacker's
plans. They were successful at the cost of their own lives. But who
knows how many lives they saved by doing so?

But once the attacks happened, once the World Trade Center went down in
flames, American character reasserted itself. Fire fighters and rescue
workers from around the country converged on “ground zero” in Manhattan.
Hundreds of doctors descended on New York City hospitals ready to give
aid to the many injured. In addition, unskilled volunteers lined up for
city blocks to volunteer to help clear the rubble. Tow truck operators
from the surrounding area lined up to help haul away crushed vehicles
and other scrap metal.

People in every city in the country lined up to donate blood. Money and
supplies have flooded the relief centers. Prayer services in religious
institution were held the entire week. Impromptu memorials sprang up
everywhere. Everyone wanted to volunteer. Everyone wanted to help.
Everyone wanted to somehow make it better.

Perhaps unlike any other people in the world, the American people look
within themselves and to each other when it comes to overcoming
oppression, hardship, natural disasters, and evil. Now that our
attention has been brutally drawn to this new threat, the country as a
whole is facing up to it with the usual American gusto.

But what, exactly, is this threat? Who, exactly, is the enemy? What,
exactly, do they want from us? How do we make these evil events go away?
How do we know when the danger is behind us? When will be able to
rebuild the World Trade Center and when will we feel safe working in it
again?

All the evidence shared with the American public so far points to some
off-the-wall religious fanatics who claim that killing over 5,000
innocent people will some how please their God. The do it, supposedly,
in the name of Islam. But why exactly?

Part of their disgust with America stems, no doubt, from our support for
Israel, their sworn enemy since the day the state of Israel was founded.
But the terrorist attacks on September 11th were not made against
Israel, they were made against the United States. The attacks were not
only gruesome, they were highly symbolic. They were made against symbols
of America's military commitment, symbols of American's commitment to
free trade and commerce, and if that fourth plane really was heading
toward Camp David, symbols of America's commitment to democratically
elected government. The fanatics may be mad as hell about our commitment
to Israel, but we are the root cause of their hatred.

If you look at the societies that these fanatics tend to create, you see
a vast contrast between what they have built for themselves with what
they choose to destroy. They run their society as a church-state We are
careful to separate the two. They brook no tolerance for any religion
but their own particular brand of Islam. We learn to tolerate and even
celebrate religious diversity, and are proud of the fact that differing
religions can coexist peacefully. They define one's role in society
based on gender, race, and age and cram every individual into a single
mold of the Perfect Citizen. We work tirelessly to rid ourselves of
stereotyping and inequality constantly trying to base our respect for
each other on the nature of individual character and not accidents of
birth. Our society is open, permeable, and free. And if we don't live up
to these marks, we at least know that it's the goal we are striving for.

So the attack that occurred on September 11th, if it must be expressed
in terms of War, is a Culture War as much or even more than it is a
military war. If the militant Muslims that attacked the United States
wanted to engage us in an actual military war, they would have attacked
a military target or started a series of guerilla actions against the
government. But the attacks were neither of these. They were symbolic
attacks on our culture, our way of life.

How do you fight a Culture War? Everyone responds in their own way. And
the outpouring of grief, the outpouring of support, the outpouring of
hard work on the rescue and recovery efforts, those long lines at the
blood donor centers, those fund raising drives, are assertions of our
character and assertions of our culture. It's important that we each
contribute in our own way to these things no so much that we can
literally do anything to help, but because we need to assert our
character and our culture.

But all these efforts are defensive in nature. And as we ship aircraft
carriers and battle groups and Marines and soldiers off to some vague
destination in the Middle East, we are still essentially asserting our
character and taking a defensive position in the Culture War. Bombs and
bullets can serve justice to those who perpetrated the evil, unspeakable
acts on our innocent friends and family. But they won't change the
culture of hate, the animosity.

How then? Who then? What can be done to end the Culture clash? What can
bring victory and peace to the Culture War? As is often the case, the
front line soldiers for this new Culture War haven't asked for the job.
The American Revolution was fought and won by Religious dissidents with
guns who objected to government interference with free association and
free trade. The abolitionist movement was fought for years by an
unlikely coalition of northern intellectuals, churches, and oppressed
blacks before it gained popular support. People laughed at the Women's
Suffrage movement for decades before they changed the nature of their
culture. Other examples exist around the world. Perhaps the most notable
is Gandhi's one man movement that turned into a revolution of change in
his own country.

But no one wakes up in the morning and decides to risk ridicule, life,
and limb for a cause. It happens to them. It happens when their long
held convictions, when their way of life, when their culture is
threatened. They fight these battles because they can't live any other
way.

How can this Culture War be won and who must win it? Partly the American
people must win it. We have to win it by not letting the attacks of
September 11th destroy our culture. We have to continue to cherish the
American character now more than ever. We can't be frightened.

But the real Culture War that is currently being fought, the Culture War
that must be won, is a civil war among the people of the Islamic faith.
And the real front line soldiers of this Culture War are the civilized
Muslims throughout the world whose faith and religion are being
disgraced and perverted by the fanatics that attacked the United States.

It's a war between civilized Muslims who aren't afraid of living within
a secular, democratic government and Muslim who believe that the the
state has the right to impose a religion on its citizens. It's a war
between Muslims who aren't threatened by religious pluralism and who are
tolerant and respectful of other beliefs and Muslim who work for the
destruction of anyone who doesn't subscribe to their particular view of
the world. It's a war between Muslims who understand that a free economy
and free trade are liberating and Muslims who view free trade as
corrupting.

To recycle a phrase from the Sixties, civilized Muslims around the world
need to realize that either they are part of the solution or they are
part of the problem. They didn't ask for the this burden. They weren't
consulted. But nonetheless the burden has fallen on them. Americans can
fight to preserve their culture and their way of life. They can fight to
see that justice is served to the perpetrators of these evil deeds. But
America by itself can't fight or win the War over the future of Islam.

Only Muslims can determine the fate of Islam. Either Islam will learn to
coexist in a peaceful, pluralist, tolerant community of religions and
civilized nations or it won't survive. The rest of the civilized world
will accept nothing else.

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                 About Stuck In Traffic

Stuck In Traffic is a monthly magazine dedicated to evaluating 
current events, examining cultural phenomena, and sharing true 
stories.  

                      Why "Stuck In Traffic"?

Because getting stuck in traffic is good for you.  It's an 
opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect on all things, from the 
personal to the global.  As Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art 
of Motorcycle Maintenance, 

         "Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in 
         which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, 
         the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all 
         possible situations, but the best possible 
         situation you could be in.  After all, it's exactly 
         this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much 
         trouble to induce...." 

                   Contact Information

All queries, submissions, subscription requests, comments, and 
hate-mail should be sent to Calvin Powers via E-mail 
(calvin@cspowers.com).

                     Copyright Notice 

Stuck In Traffic is published and copyrighted by Calvin Powers 
who reserves all rights.  Individual articles are copyrighted by 
their respective authors.  Unsigned articles are authored by Calvin 
Powers.  

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http://www.StuckInTraffic.com/ 

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