Our fury: Handle with care

09/13/2001

By JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News

As Tuesday gave way to Wednesday, grief and disbelief, for many people, crystallized into rage.

When terrorists carried out the unthinkable, the universal reaction was "Oh, my God." It took a day for that shock to harden into a steely resolve: "This is war."

It was everywhere: The president, the shell-shocked survivors, the military leaders whose grim demeanor plainly says they're ready to fight as soon as somebody points out the enemy.

A Dallas parking lot attendant, interviewed on camera, said he's ready to sign up, ready to make any sacrifice to strike back at whoever inflicted such awful damage on our sense of liberty and security.

It's a reaction that has served this country well in the past. Any historian will tell you that the Axis powers fatally underestimated the United States' tolerance for provocation during World War II: They thought Americans were too politically divided, too lazy, too pleasure-loving to fight. They thought Americans were too rich and fat to make the sacrifices that war demands, and they were wrong.

I'm angry, too, at the sheer scope of the devastation that a few terrorists were able to inflict. According to some reports, the hijackers coldly told passengers aboard the doomed airplanes that they were about to die. I find such cruelty unfathomable, inhuman.

And it was easy to be angry at the news footage – shocking, even after so many other shocking images – that showed joyous Palestinians at a celebratory street dance in Jerusalem. How dare they, I thought.

It's easy to be angry. It feels better, in a way, than the numbing disbelief that came before. Some of the writers who e-mailed their thoughts to our Web site gave full vent to their rage:

"We must build our case and go after those who are at fault," said one, and I certainly agree.

But then there was this:

"So they want a 'Holy war,' huh?" said one posting. "They got it! Onward Christian Soldiers!"

Then there was this person, who apparently hasn't heard about that church-and-state thing:

"The U.S. should be closed to all peoples who are worshippers of Islam."

And I'm sure anybody with a radio has heard callers from the giddy "nuke 'em all" lobby queued up to get on the air.

Those comments hit me like a bucket of cold water. Anger is a powerful motivator and a potent weapon, but it doesn't seem very productive to wave it around like a drunk with a loaded gun.

Because this is not about "Christian" and "Muslim." It's not about "American" and "Arab." Yes, those political overtones are present, but thinking in those terms drags untold numbers of innocents into the fray. This is about the vast majority of us being shocked and unsettled by a handful of lunatics poisoned by their own fanaticism.

I'm mad as hell at the people who did this, and whoever financed and sponsored them, and even at any nation that tolerates and harbors their organizations.

My anger doesn't extend to the kindly Jordanian man at the convenience store near my house, or to the cheerful lady in Islamic dress who works at the supermarket. It doesn't have anything to do with the deeply religious Muslim doctor who has been a helpful source for me on several medical stories.

There was another hard-learned lesson from World War II. That was the lingering shame of having locked up thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry for no earthly reason other than racial paranoia.

My in-laws lived in Hawaii at that time, where the Japanese-American population was much too large to be interned. Had they lived on the mainland, they might have been locked up, too.

History provides us some valuable lessons, and the most valuable may be this:

Anger is a powerful weapon. Let's use it carefully.