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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 21, 2001
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First a word from our sponsor God: ... "Fear not." Those of you who are Christian and maybe some who are not may wish to review the whole passage from the first chapter of the Book of Revelation: "Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore; and have the keys of hell and of death." I am starting this piece in this "unorthodox" way today (even though it is called a "Sunday Spectator") because I think we need to be reminded of the big picture behind current events. Now back to the war. The anthrax scare has been spreading together with other alarms fed by both isolated fact and promiscuous rumour. But it is not as presently understood even a great danger. Twenty thousand people die each year of the flu and a thousand from inhaling noxious substances. At the present rate at which anthrax infections are being discovered there is no hope of matching either of those figures. But let's start with the "worst case scenario" and work backwards from there. If you can handle the worst then you can handle anything. The "worst case" is if you are going to die and even that can be managed. For when Mullah Omar tells his Taliban troops that they're all going to die anyway why not now instead of later he is touching on this feature of our common humanity. My father once put it somewhat better in his recollection of the last world war. Some 40 000 perished in London and elsewhere under the Luftwaffe strikes from the fall of 1940 to the spring of '41 most of them indefensible civilians. This "Battle of Britain" was extremely grim but the survivors got used to it got on with it digging each other out of the rubble. "No matter how bad things are you have to remember either you get killed or you don't. The rest is just psychology." I have some empathy for my own generation and the younger ones. Thanks largely to the generations that came before us we didn't have to deal with any large catastrophe. And we're not quite used to such things yet almost every one of us has grown up in security and been surrounded by material luxuries on an historically unprecedented scale. The scourge of war was in distant places or in distant times. We have never known what it is to manage fear from the time we rise each morning what it is to have this test. But we are learning now we are coming to our turn and by God we'll pass it. In fact New York with no time to prepare at all passed its own first test in triumph. And I don't think North Americans at large are quite such whimpering ninnies as the media have portrayed. It is worth dwelling on this aspect of "the terrors" for a paragraph or two. A few years ago I made myself unpopular by carping at the funeral of Diana the late Princess of Wales. It struck me as I wrote then that millions of people milling along the parade routes of London were indulging a sentimentalism that nature would not long forgive. I asked aloud what will happen when these people have some real grief instead of a fantasy over some fairy princess known to them only through stories and pictures? It was worse than this: for from day to day as the grief hysteria spread through people in the crowds I watched the media descend to the street level. Tame headlines were replaced with bold bold with front page posters as the days progressed. The papers were transformed from news sources into souvenirs. The television coverage was around the clock and yet with nothing new to say. For a moment after the strikes on the World Trade Centre I was possessed by a rather horrible thought. What if Elton John again rewrites his lyrics and we have Candles in the Wind ? But then I realized it could never happen because this event was real. There would be no more room for emotional fakery and somewhat less for entrepreneurial effrontery. Instead we would have to be on guard against panic. And now the anthrax scare has put us on the line. How quickly can we grow out of the childlike mawkishness so perfectly expressed by the funeral of Diana? Or are we just going to scream and scream? The truth is that for the foreseeable future few of us are or will be in any kind of mortal danger -- unless we panic. For the whole intention of terrorist attacks is to induce fear to induce panic to make us behave in irrational and especially in self-destructive ways. The truth is anyone who manifests or communicates panic is working for the other side. The anthrax threat is not a serious one even those who receive envelopes will find that most of them contain nothing better than talcum powder. The scheme was cleverly devised by foreigners who took a very dim view of Western people. The 20th-century fin de si?cle was a "tabloid" age. We went about in designer clothes but dragging our tawdry emotions behind us. It is time to return to the "broadsheet" point of view. The media presently are not being very helpful. Take for instance a typical "tabloid" device actually seen on CNN. We are told a bunch of speculative nonsense and then that There is further information that the network has agreed to withhold. ... Oh please: even the National Enquirer never sank that low. I wish that my colleagues in every part of the media would wake to this simple fact: we are part of the war and thus the war effort whether we want to be or not. What we write or say or do has implications on the street. Our duty is to tell the truth as well as we are able; the truth is what will serve our cause. And tell the whole truth in its larger context not just the scary bits enhanced by speculation. But that means telling with a cool head and some conscious discretion. There is no room for hysteria. For even when the worst comes to the worst as it must eventually do for all people the words we shall first hear will be Fear not. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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