Land of the Free, Home of the Scared

PEARL HARBQI MADE US ANGRY.

9/11 MADE US FRIGHTENED. AN NOW WE'RE LIVr WITH THE CONS

Here in the morning's start. I glance at the television, and there is the sudden notice:

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. 1.944 PEOPLE DID LAST YEAR. CALL 1-888-NYCSAFE.

The Metropolitan Transit Aiithnritv nut this ad ,A

on television.

I'm standing in the bedroom, and I'm thinking of an ad you see on T-shirts in the neigh­borhood of Brownsville, in Brooklyn: t

SNITCHES GET STITCHES.

I am much more comfortable with the defense polic\

ui Druwiibvine iridn I am with this selling of fear by an official government agency. Nobody in the city transit system knows how many calls resulted in arrests. Certainly there are no stories in Brownsville of any carnage caused bv

stool pigeons. Which is good, for the neighborhood is the historic district of the old Murder Inc. Things still happen.

On this morning, we try to train spies on our own streets, replacing the stan­dard with which we lived so long and so famously, the wonderful standard to assist one another. Always, on any given day in the city of New York, there are so many—a million or more—who say "excuse me" as they get on or off a sub­way car. Now they want these people to say "He looks like a terrorist."

We gave so much of that away to this Bin Laden and his Saudi Arabian imbe­ciles. We did all our worrying about struc­tures. There was the day when there suddenly appeared on Broadway a line of police cars—100 of them—and they pulled in front of Lincoln Center and parked diagonally. This is called the Surge, in which a line of cars appears unexpect­edly at places around the city and parks, a river of metal, a warning to somebody who wants to blow up something. I was on Lenox Avenue in Harlem one day when the cars arrived. "It's the president," a woman said. When there was no presi­dent, she went to the next possibility. "They got big World Trade Center bombers still around here."

Terrorism, the word, causes outright fear and also complete insanity from the center of New York to any town out­side it. This all started only a matter of hours after the fiery World Trade Center buildings collapsed in smoke that made the streets black and filled them with body parts, computer insides, lightbulbs, window glass,

rarnot and oloua.

tor cables. Immedi­ately that brought these bright-red fire chiefs' cars from places like the Mas-sapequa, Long Island fire department and patrol cars from the Cliff-y side Park, New Jersey police department, from everywhere in the towns around the

great city, anywhere

big fat guys with badges

jammed into official

cars can rush to the

scene in Manhattan.

They sent up clouds

of dust and made the

sirens sound. Look

out! Here we come

to the catastrophe.

There was no need for

them, but they stopped

nd nimned out and stood

ready for anything. They wore helmets and eager faces.

After them came the federals and also a retired firefighter named Bob Beckwith, who came from Long Island on the third day because his family didn't want him to go. But here he was standing atop a fire truck mostly submerged in dirt and wreckage. Karl Rove, a lackey in charge of lies, brought over George W. Bush, who was here on the third day because you could hardly get him out of the classroom in Florida where he froze on the day of the attack. He got up on that fire truck with a bullhorn and became the first cheer­leader ever to be at a terrorist event.

If you worked, the day belonged to Local 40 of the Iron Workers and Locals 14 and 15 of the Operating Engineers. That day I knew we were turning over everything to the uniforms. When we had Pearl Harbor the country got angry. The World Trade Center created fear. And a government can take fear and control everything with it.

For instance, take the gum-ball machine in one corner of a store in Dover, New Jer­sey. People saw the glass puff up, and the gum balls inside became ominous. Small sounds made them seem threatening.

This put fear into the town of Dover.

There are perhaps 18,000 who live there, and a large number of them are Latino.

Somebody brought the matter to the Dover Council, and Alderman Frank Poolas was quoted as saying the gum-ball machine might be something terror­ists could use to attack Dover.

Why would anybody want to attack Dover with a gum-ball machine?

Then Poolas and the Dover politicians said the Chinese could poison children with lead in the trinkets in the gum machine. Or they could outright put poison in the gum.

"I mentioned the terrorism after I brought up the Chinese threat to the gum machines," Poolas said.

He ended it sensibly by calling for licensing of the machines so we could monitor these terrible threats.

These small examples like Dover go unnoticed at first, but then they are noticed because they occur too often. Not too long ago a lifeguard was snorkel-ing in the Atlantic about 300 yards off Tobay Beach in Massapequa, when he spotted a metal cylinder sticking out of the sand. He picked it up and brought it to a policeman on the shore. He thought it was a bomb used by fishermen to knock blackfish and sea bass out of an

old shipwreck a few yards away and into waiting nets. Soon the bomb squad, the emergency-services unit and the marine and aviation units were on the scene. The bomb squad reported they had disabled the pipe bomb, which then was given to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which sent it to a laboratory in Maryland. The beach, one of the busiest on Long Island, was closed.

The bomb was at a historic site. In June 1942 a German submarine, the Innsbruck, rested on the sand just off­shore at Amagansett, just up from the Massapequa bomb site. Four Germans, sent here to sabotage, came off the sub and rowed to shore in a rubber lifeboat. A Coast Guardsman, John Cullen, 21, was patrolling the beach alone and unarmed; there were not enough rifles to be given to Coast Guardsmen at this time. For some weird reason, the Germans did not attack Cullen. One gave him $260 and told him to forget what he saw. The Germans caught a train to Manhattan. Cullen ran to the Coast Guard station, but nobody believed him. particularly the FBI. Only when they combed the beach and found a crushed pack of Ger­man cigarettes did they listen to Cullen. The Germans were caught. Two were executed. Two were sent to prison.

You blame the World Trade Center attack on Saddam Hussein. That gave you an invasion of Iraq that was sup­posed to last 20 minutes, and that was

years ago—and there seem to be years ahead of us. Nobody really differs. Any­body in or around government says, "We must stop the terrorists in Iraq because they can come to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles."

Terrorists may come. What do they get if they bomb or destroy this place? You lose a beautiful building. Some people. Maybe even known ones. But there is no man or woman who is indispensable. Nothing stops. The subway under the sidewalk keeps rolling.

Out of fear, we have troops running in the streets with their rifles pointing as they practice for terrorists. Go to the funeral of soldier Luis Moreno, 19, at St. Francis of Assisi Church in the Bronx. The general sent to the funeral was leav­ing church in the rain when Jessica Cor-poran, a small Latina, so beautiful, so young, only 18, came up to the general and said, "I want to know something."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why is my fiance dead?"

She looked at him with deep brown eyes. She looked and he sagged. He went back on his heels first and then half a step as she kept looking, and he rnuld sav nothine and half stumbled

away. He was afraid of her, and we are afraid of the subject: young death.

The soldier died because his govern­ment was afraid. See the next big head­line: BUSH FEARS IRAN.

I am walking with a group of about 200 ragamuffins pushed into one lane on Broadway in 2001. They are demonstrat­ing for Housing Works, which tries to find homes for the homeless and people with virtually no income, all of whom have HIV or AIDS. The marchers look like bones that came rattling out of the American Museum of Natural History. They limp right against the curb. A line of cops, about 500 of them, is making sure nobody moves out into Broadway, because then they may try to get across the street to City Hall. The thought of this terrifies Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor in City Hall. Look up at the roof where the police department's best snipers, with rifles out­lined against a gray October sky, are ready to shoot and kill. What, am I crazy? I say to myself. No, you sure are not. Look at them. Those are real rifles. How marvel­ous! They are going to end AIDS. They are going to kill everybody who has it.

If possible, the march of taxi drivers looked worse. There were maybe 150 of them, and a thousand cops were herding them along. Again Giuliani was terrified. He called them "taxi terrorists." The taxi drivers were small and looked like com­plete bums. Ever look into the front seat of a cab and see what the driver looks

ike? No matter. Giuliani had battalions -eady to shoot them down like dogs. See the snipers!

Now I see Giuliani himself looking up. 1 know it was in the moments before the World Trade Center towers collapsed on that September morning. I was walking toward the fiery towers, and here was Giuliani walking away from them. He had his staff of—believe me—stumblebums with him, and he was looking for some­thing only he could see: the future that was forming for him. This was the biggest disaster in America, and he was the only public official on the scene. As the build­ings collapsed he was several blocks up and safe in a building in front of a televi­sion camera. Then he moved to a studio with cameras. Only he had the badge to speak for the city's wounds. He then went on television a couple of hundred times, during which he became Amer­ica's Mayor, and now he's running for president on a platform that if you don't listen to him, your wife will get killed.

Probably the first thing he did was to cheer any proposals for more govern­ment wiretaps and eavesdropping. What we hear on our wiretaps is the clear

sound of a terrorist's defeat. Nowhere has anybody mentioned that the num­ber of people who mishear things is astounding. People are in prison or out because the agent reporting the wire­taps had them saying "late" when they actually said "snake." But the listening went on because we are afraid even of writing on a T-shirt. Raed Jarrar was at Kennedy Airport in New York for a flight to Oakland, California on JetBlue. He was wearing a T-shirt with Arabic and English letters saying we shall not be silent. An airline security man asked him to change the T-shirt. He said peo­ple were feeling uncomfortable about the Arabic. Jarrar. who is an Iraqi con­sultant for the American Friends Ser­vice Committee and one of its bloggers, would not change the shirt. Finally, they bought him a new one and he wore that over the filthy Arabic script and flew to Oakland. He is in court to fight for his rights for the reasons that he is still angry and feels he must fight for rights that are everyone's.

This sounds a trifle romantic until you fly yourself. I don't even want to do it anymore. The day that did it was on a stormy morning at Kennedy Airport when all those going to the gate left puddles. I did not want to take off my shoes. "The floor's wet." I told the wom­an at the gate. Oh. a pushy, disdainful woman. "You must remove your shoes." she said. (concluded on page 156)

SCARED

(continued from page 118)

"Dry the floor," I said.

"You must remove your shoes or you will not be allowed on the plane," she said.

"Let me speak to somebody in charge," I said.

"I am in charge, and you take off your shoes," she said.

1 did not. Nor did I go on the plane.

But we all lost more of our freedom to move about. And you would think that our superior technology, our technology so sophisticated, could announce that the man third in line has a bomb in his shoe.

In the first of a morning in New York on the east side, the darkness lifts its hand so slightly, then a little more, and now the United Nations building is outlined against a changing sky. Above, on the right, the first cars of the morning rush across the bridge to jobs, the headlights snapping at the darkness. The East River below catches the lights. The dark water runs with the light sparkling on the sur­face, and the water carries the little lights until the sky starts to become pink, now turning to red, and the day explodes on the United Nations building. You stand and watch, and it is impossible not to say a prayer. Can anybody finally say that

rational thought has been drowned and that we have allowed cowardice to take us to war? Either the strong arise or their arms will tire carrying coffins.

I am walking in the night rain on the cobblestones in front of New York's City Hall, which is deserted because they have police booths to keep citizens out. You have to go through a metal detector, have any papers or briefcases examined, show identification and com­port yourself as a responsible American. Then you can go through, and into the lenses of five or six cameras that are on the building ledges and in the trees like curious pigeons. Down in the basement there are police officers who sit all day and night and monitor the multiple screens. They stare at the screens. Stare, stare, stare. When you reach the top of the steps to the hall, police officers are at the doors to ask where you are going.

Now on this night, I walk toward the street, Broadway, and go along a fence that takes any pleasure out of the lovely park on the other side. The park has a fence. Of course it has a fence. Our fear has brought us here. The fence keeps people from walking in or out of this lovely park.

This was among the many rights lost since the attack. You can't even leave a park unguarded.

A government can take fear

and control everything with it.