Duck and Cover
May 8th, 2007 by ramvort
Grant Elementary was a typical late fifties school, shaped in an ‘L’ ,long and low, with windows along its belt-line that opened out with the twist of a handle and a little push. The hallways were inside, the playground on one side, city streets on the other.
In the late fifties, and into the early sixties we still practiced Civil Defense drills, along with the fire drills causing some people to get a little confused at times, so it was made really clear to us when we were supposed to evacuate, and when we were to line up in the hallway and ‘duck and cover’ with our heads against the wall, and our arms over our heads in a defensive posture. Being against the wall was supposed to keep us from being seriously injured by a nuclear blast, disregarding the fallout and other consequences entirely. But, if we could survive the initial blast, perhaps we had a chance of surviving all the rest.
The cold war mentality did its job, I had nightmares about the windows shattering in my school from nuclear blasts, dark planes above sending bombs raining down on us.. and that, was the idea. Without it, the cold warriors wouldn’t have been able to sell the military buildup, the domino theory and the war in Vietnam.
The duck tape alert of 2003 reminded me somewhat of all this preparation for nothing, with the ulterior motive there in the background.
The twenty-first century has its parallel in the disaster of 9-11-2001, and the co-opting of the tragedy for the purposes of Bush’s government. The freedoms abridged by the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and their minions needed a dark, unspecified enemy to fight, and they got it in spades. It is no longer necessary to have a reason to arrest someone, all it takes is to suspect that they may have conspired, talked about, maybe even read about, anything the government deems related to terrorist activities. We can be wiretapped without a warrant, in complete contradiction to the rulings of our highest court.
The idea that crimes can be projected into the future, that nothing has to happen to cause one to be listed as a terrorist is a shift in criminal justice behavior that goes completely against the grain of constitutional rights and the spirit of the law.
We have stepped backwards into the abyss of Big Brother and 1984.
The big problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of who our enemy is, and what it is they are fighting for. Since we supported Bin Laden during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, we should, but we have missed the point, over and over. The very idea of a democratic government is anathema to militant Islamists who believe that the only law is God’s Law, giving control to a voting populace doesn’t interest them in the least. The small war in Afghanistan was turned into a a far war, not by the enemy, but by the president of the United States who chose to ignore reasoning, and send our troops into the heart of the middle east.
We are a target for exactly that reason, our troops in Saudi Arabia, infidels on sacred land, have engendered hostility since their arrival, and their continued presence only compounds the animosity.
There was nothing more we could have done to further the desires of our enemies than to invade Afghanistan, which was the downfall of the Soviet Union, and Iraq where we could dissipate our resources and kill and harm our children as we kill the Iraqis. All the time, incurring the wrath of the Islamic world as we destroy any goodwill we might have had amongst them. Now we are ducking and covering, waging war as imperialists (regardless of intention, it doesn’t really matter about our motives to the rest of the world) and suffering economic crisis as we spend the future in trillions of national debt.
