The American Way

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your fingers on.

In Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed 1985 dystopia, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she foretells a future of a world turned upside down in the aftermath of a national tragedy. And while we are by no means suggesting that the Sept. 11 attacks foreshadow any such negative repercussions, this extreme case does offer an appropriate starting point to discuss some of the lessons that we have learned from our own history. Lessons that we must safeguard throughout the proceeding hostilities.

In an honorable attempt to protect the citizens of this country, government officials have, during times of war, often lobbied for crackdowns on certain individual liberties for the expressed purpose of upholding order. In a war against the faceless enemies who have attacked our people and attacked our way of life, it becomes far too easy to get caught up in hunting down the enemy by any means necessary and overlooking the protection of the innocent.

While we seek to defend ourselves against future threats, we must also guard against allowing our own anger and fear to cause us to act against our own interests as a free people. We have already seen pundits and political leaders suggesting the fight against terrorism requires us to sacrifice the constitutional liberties that are at the core of what it means to be an American. That would be a victory for our nation’s enemies.

We have already witnessed violence and harassment directed toward Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans. Now is the time for all Americans to rise up against this cowardly behavior in their own neighborhoods. We made an unthinkable mistake when, during World War II, we abducted Japanese-Americans from their homes and shipped them off to internment camps. It is intolerable when Muslim-Americans fear for their safety in neighborhoods and communities where they live.

We will relentlessly support the government’s efforts to bring these terrorists to justice. And we will just as relentlessly stand up and fight efforts to exploit this terrible tragedy in ways that may chip away at the civil liberties for which we have fought for and died to uphold. Now, more than ever, we must strive to reinforce and to protect the ideals of the American way.