Mission Misunderaccomplished

Though it was probably a mere blip on the national news, the explosion of a chemical plant in Danvers, Massachusetts the day before Thanksgiving has chewed up our local headlines and television newscasts; understandably so. People have been injured, made homeless, and lost employment due to the wee-small-hours event on Wednesday morning. Later that same morning, I heard a story that traveled in the usual manner of oral histories through the cousin of a friend of a coworker and it left me shaking my head. As in most households in the towns abutting Danvers, a little boy and his family were literally shaken from their beds in the middle of the night by the first and greatest explosion. Next they experienced a series of aftershock-like blasts as the inferno raged through the plant. At each explosion, the 5-year-old lad was so terrified that he fainted. According to the storyteller, this little fellow was certain The Terrorists had come to murder him in his bed.

I can't help but make the obvious connection between this little boy's experience and our War On Terror. Think about this: for the child's entire life, we have been at war against terror. His paranoia was inherited as a birthright. He was swaddled in the stuff, as was every child born since the autumn of 2001. His story makes the case that by labeling the war as a fight against a basic human emotion, we have only succeeded in inflating said emotion. It begs the question, "What are we thinking?"

Or perhaps it begs the question, "Why are we thinking?" Can Intelligence (and by that I mean both the act of thinking and the official spying of warfare) do battle with emotion and come out the victor? Personally, I'm not buying it. I've seen too much evidence to the contrary. Terror itself can never be defeated but it is our obligation as moral, responsible, and, yes, feeling adults to seek to mitigate it. From what I've seen, declaring war against it not only fails to make it disappear from the face of the earth, it actually inflates the problem by placing it front and center in the minds of the citizenry, including our children.

Probably I've let the job of motherhood get to me. Accuse me of thinking with my heart instead of my brain on this one but frankly, I think the world could do with a few more people with Hearts For Brains. Especially amongst those in positons of power and leadership.