Shock Waves
After a shared national tragedy, what comes next?
"There's a fine line between safety and individual rights," says Todd Longsworth, an attorney in Boston, "and I hope maintaining that line won't be too hard." It need not be, says University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein, if people think more clearly about what the state should do in the execution of its most important responsibility: protecting citizens from those who use force or fraud against them. "People are already starting to talk about increasing security measures and putting more controls over citizens. Why not arm pilots or air marshals?" he asks. "If we had a more coherent program, we'd have more people trained to use arms to protect us from rogues and terrorists. We can lose a lot of freedoms and gain nothing, or we can meet the threat of force with force. "
Fears. Some Americans also recognize the need to guard against depriving the rights of some citizens in the name of national security. "We should think about how poorly we handled our fears in the past," says historian Alan Brinkley, citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as one of America's least glorious hours. "We all feel under attack--all of us Americans are under attack, and it's time to huddle together," says Maher Hathout, a cardiologist and spokesman for Muslim rights in Arcadia, Calif. "I'm always afraid of the ignorant. Always, in every society, there are fanatics and ignorant people who can react in unpredictable ways. When there's hype and innuendoes and premature actions, anything can happen."
But maybe there are signs of hope even where fear tends to rule. "The press has been more objective," says Farkhunda Ali, communications director of the American Muslim Council in Washington, D.C. "Ever since we found out that the real perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing weren't Muslim, the press is being more objective--at this time anyway."
Handling fears may be the most profound challenge of all, and America's religious leaders have taken a conspicuous lead. "My experience has been that people who never think of God any other time will turn their eyes, or at least their attention, to something outside themselves at a time like this," says the Rev. Peg Cantwell of Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin, which offered two special prayer services on the day of the attacks. She received a phone call from a man who couldn't reach relatives in New York City, asking her to pray for them during the services. "He said, `Can you just mention their names? Can you just say their names?' "
Before long, Cantwell expects to be fielding questions from parishioners whose faith in God was shaken by the tragedy of last week's attacks. "It's normal to be angry at God," she says. "If somebody comes to me in that mode, all I'd want to say is tell the Lord, `If you're there, I'm angry at you.' But the thing I'd like to try to help them not do is shut God out."
Coming up with answers is not easy, even for a religious thinker well known for helping ordinary people make sense of tragedy. "I'm as stunned and amazed as anyone," says Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Still, Kushner has an answer to the age-old question: How can a just God permit evil to flourish? "We believe in Judaism that God has given human beings the choice to opt for doing good or doing evil." But Kushner does not believe that this is the moment to get into elaborate theological explanations of why God gave people free will. The proper religious response now, he says, "is to dry the tears and hold the hands of people who have suffered losses." Michael Manning, a Catholic priest and host of the television show The Word in the World, speaks more assertively of the need to fight evil, even while acknowledging the painful truth that Christians in the past, during the Inquisition and the Crusades, allowed themselves to lose touch with the "God of love and patience and love for all."
Americans learned to balance their ideals of forgiveness and justice many times in their past. Their foes might consider how quickly they are forcing Americans to do so again.
With Angie Cannon, Andrew Curry, Dan Gilgoff, Carolyn Kleiner, Linda Kulman, Rachel Hartigan Shea and Ben Wildavsky
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