Author: Janice Turner
Publication: The Guardian, UK
Date: October 30, 2002
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,822109,00.html
I've not been sleeping well, and
for once the causes aren't domestic. It's not builders, deadlines or bills,
but Bali, Washington, Moscow. Suddenly, world news isn't some distant background
thrum you can tune out, it's big and it's scary and it's coming to get
you.
It seems I am experiencing a new
strain of global angst, one which makes you feel fearful and foolish in
equal measure. Last week, my husband and I were enjoying a rare day alone,
when it suddenly struck me how selfish our actions were. If anything happened
to us, our children would be orphaned. And it's not just me. Many friends
will no longer use the tube. Others have stopped flying or only travel
on carefully researched "safe" airlines.
A mother at my sons' school won't
risk buying a winter coat: "I know it sounds ludicrous, but I just don't
want to die in some bus queue outside Selfridge's." A high-powered friend
has a bag permanently packed so she can flee quickly to the country in
the event of chemical attack.
All this is melodramatic and risible.
We, sane adults with children and careers, laugh at ourselves. Of course
we know that constructing a complex underground route across London to
avoid all major "target" stations is the grown-up equivalent of avoiding
cracks in the pavement. But it doesn't stop us. Terrorism is making obsessive-compulsives
of us all.
If you live outside London or have
endured a proper war, your lip is probably curling by now. But here, in
some small, unspoken way, terrorism is starting to fulfil its central objective:
it is making people scared. It is entering our thought processes and already
governing, in some measure, the way we run our lives.
Most days I can stop myself idly
wondering what it would feel like if the rucksack-wearer strap-hanging
in front of me self- detonated. I can enjoy a trip on the London Eye despite
the fact that I saw two men behaving "suspiciously" in the ticket queue.
Of course London has faced terrorist campaigns before in the IRA attacks
of the 70s. But surveys show people are more anxious now, even though London
has not yet experienced its own 9/11. Because with the IRA, we comforted
ourselves that there were rules, warnings of sorts, some logical objective.
But with the hydra of Islamist extremism there are none.
All our previous certainties about
human behaviour have been shattered. We are dealing with people who don't
even seek to preserve their own lives, who will kill children without mercy,
who don't believe in "innocent victims". Because they would like to kill
us all they don't care which of us they take.
"If men had babies, they wouldn't
plant bombs," said the mother of a Bali victim. Yet in Moscow, it was women
laden with explosives, who spread themselves among the crowd of theatre
goers to maximise destruction.
With our moral compass rendered
useless, we are wandering in a fog of fear. And who is to guide us? Certainly
not a government which buys enough smallpox vaccine to innoculate us all,
having made some calculated risk assessment, yet chooses not to share it
with us.
In the long term, if unaddressed,
our formless fear will manifest itself in a hunkering down, a preference
for home, a deep reluctance to travel far. It is a bitter pill for us,
the first backpack generation who in gap years and career breaks crossed
Asia and Africa, hoping in our liberal hearts that our tourist dollars
were better spent in family-run hostels and road-side dhabas than at Club
Med.
Thirst for sun may still lead us
abroad, but will we soon only feel comfortable in enclosed compounds, ringed
with security guards and hermetically sealed from local life?
Moreover how can you show your children
the world if all you want to do is save them from it? My sons have reached
an age when I'd like to take them further than the Spanish Costas, but
why would I take them to India now? Why would I risk it when I'd think
twice about taking them to Santa in Hamley's?
If fear of paedophilia is making
us overprotective of our very young, fear of terrorism will surely cause
us to blight their adolescence. Yet terrorism has things to teach us and
perhaps they are precisely what we set out to discover when we travelled
rough across the third world. Perhaps those of us who have taken our freedom
and personal security for granted are learning a little humility, now that
we are having a taste of life in more fragile places. And the price of
that lesson is our peace of mind.
