The Culture of Paranoia

My wife was looking thorough a trunk we keep in the basement the other day and came upon four newspapers that told of a tragic event that would change things for many years to come.  The newspapers were dated September 12^th, 13^th, 14^th and 15^th 2001 and of course told of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11^th.  It was the beginning of a period where paranoia became part of our culture.  We have been suffering from it ever since.  The progression of the headlines is interesting in themselves:

 - September 12^th – “An Evil Act”

 - September 13^th – “We Are at War”

 - September 14^th – “We Will Rip Them Up”, subtitled “U.S. Vows Revenge ‘in the first war of the 21^st Century’”

 - September 15^th – “Our Closest Friends” recounting the mass rally on Parliament Hill as Canada mourns those killed in the attack.  A subtitle in this edition said, “Bush promises to ‘rid the world of evil’.

And so started the war on terrorism, and as in all wars, the U.S. in particular, and the rest of the western world to a lesser extent, became afraid of the ‘enemy’, just like we had become afraid of the Germans and Japanese during World War 2.  Or just as we had become afraid of the Russians during the Cold War.  Except we could not truly identify the enemy by country, but only by ethnicity and religion.  Nonetheless, the U.S. thereafter entered into two wars against two countries.  Against Afghanistan it was triggered by the intelligence that the man who had instigated the attack lived in hiding in that country.  It also seemed to be justified on the basis that the Taliban government of Afghanistan was not friendly to the U.S.  In Iraq, the justification was the false premise that the leader of that country had weapons of mass destruction.  But the fact that most of the perpetrators of 9/11 were from neither country did not enter into the equation. There was a war to be fought, and now we were at war, so we must be fighting terrorism.  The fact that both of these wars created more terrorists, who resented foreign powers coming into their countries, than had ever been seen before again did not enter the thoughts of the western leaders who waged these wars.  A tragic spiral of violence and counter-violence entered our lives and inevitably our culture.

“I have never heard anyone state what the objective of the Afghan war was or is other than to punish someone for the 9/11 attacks.”

Me

"The objective of the Iraq War was to change the regime of Saddam Hussein.  This was achieved within days of the initial attack.  The war went on for years."

Me (again)

One of the side effects of this terrorist-induced paranoia in the U.S. was a growing feeling that, thanks to the Second Amendment, they had to have more guns to fight off terrorists whoever they may be.  Since 2001, there has been a huge increase in the number of guns that have been bought by private citizens.  Another wave of buying came about more recently when rumours circulated that somehow, President Obama was going to take their guns away, or at least stop them from being sold.  This was another sign of the paranoia that was gripping the nation.  Guns plus paranoia means that bad things are going to happen.  And so we have evidence through such things as the shootings of black people at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina.  Closer to home, we have the recent shooting at a mosque in Quebec City.  We have no way of tabulating the number of shootings that have been perpetrated because of misidentification or fear of break-ins.  But one story in Saturday’s newspaper brings it into stark reality.  A Canadian veterinarian living in the northern part of Florida with her husband was returning to her gated community one night.  She followed a pick-up truck through the community gate and proceeded to her home.  On the way she was accosted by a man and his wife with an assault rifle and accused of being “the Killer”.  She eventually identified herself to the satisfaction of the man with the gun.  He told her that his daughters had been followed through the gate into the community by “a killer” and had called their father for help.  He responded with his assault rifle.  The paranoia that was displayed during this one incident that could have got the veterinarian shot is amazing, but symptomatic of the culture the U.S., and as a result, the rest of the western world now lives in.  And to a large extent, we can thank 9/11 for that.

“To the wicked, everything serves as a pretext.”

Voltaire