John Balzar: 'Full of Fear'? Pish!

Bin Laden figures he has us trembling in our boots.

"Thank God for that," he gloated.

Perhaps he's been briefed from American TV and newspapers. People aren't sleeping, there's a run on gas masks and antibiotics, the rich are hiring security teams and planning to flee to safer shores, homeowners are looking at their floor plans to see where to seal off a safe room.

The eeriest thing I've heard was about a friend who decided not to supplement her earthquake emergency kit. If things get that bad, she decided, she didn't wantto end up on the other side of events with the survivors.

Anxiety, yes, we feel it. But I think our enemies are vastly wrong about any gains they've made. A case of the jitters is a victory for terrorism. But not a defeat for the United States. No one, not our enemy and not us, should take our disquiet as a sign of watery character.

Crisis was not something we sought, but as philosopher William James said nearly a century ago, "Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."

In this autumn of 2001, Americans find themselves looking abroad and trying to understand the passions of the people who aim, in Osama Bin Laden's words, "to destroy America." We tell ourselves to put aside the simplicity of stereotypes as we ask, who are they? We can inquire of ourselves the same. It will quiet our nerves.

When bombs started to rain on Afghanistan, I got in my car and drove to a shopping mall. By stereotype, this would be evidence of American shallowness. But malls serve many communities as public squares. And on that day, the commons at South Coast Plaza in Orange County was packed. No one was complaining about the crowds. We had convened our lives, not retreated from them.

And who are we?

We Americans are different. All of us, and that includes those we call Native Americans, have roots elsewhere. Something drove us here. This is no small matter because we spring from the heritage of those who dared, not those who were meek. The meek stayed behind, wherever behind was.

I looked around this public square at the marvel of America: Mexicans who risked their lives to traverse the awful Sonoran desert for a chance at a better life. Cambodians who survived one of the most shocking tyrannies in history. Vietnamese who fought, then fled, oppression. Filipinos and Armenians and Africans and Persians and Chinese and Koreans and Guatemalans and Japanese, and mongrels from everywhere, offspring of all the world's troubles. Americans.

Some fought their way here as a last refuge. For others, it was their first hope. Only the ancestors of American slaves did not choose their homeland, but neither did most of them decide to leave. Their struggle is as old as the nation and far from over.

I looked around. Surely these people at the mall were nervous on the inside. Perhaps they held their children a little closer. But Bin Laden was wrong when he gloated, "There is America, full of fear."

It just wasn't so. In the main courtyard of the mall, outside the Disney store where balloons rose to the ceiling, families pressed in close so their kids could meet and have their pictures taken with Cinderella. Children looked up with eyes in wonder.

It was an ideal moment for fairy tales. The careful and sometimes overwrought clichés that we often voice about cultural diversity had a different meaning just then. The kaleidoscope of faces standing in that line did not define our differences but a deep and reassuring strength. The whole idea of America is a fairy tale, after all. Gathered together, a pluralistic and self-governing fusion, we were proof of it.

To have a child is to vote for the future. To take a little girl to see Cinderella is a vote for her dreams.

I looked at these parents and the young lovers holding hands by the railing and the teenagers jostling on the escalator. On a different day, you could have called these people the pampered products of the consumer culture. The United States lends itself to trivialization that way. But in that moment, you could also reflect on what America must mean, down deep and in so many different ways, to these people drawn up from all compass points in the world to converge on these commons at the start of a war.

Bin Laden is out of his mind to think he can scare us and take it away.

By the way: The quote from Shakespeare was: "In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness .... " In Monday's column on war and peace, I paraphrased using the word "silliness," which would have worked fine too, except it was wrong.We spring from the heritage of the daring, not the meek.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2001