A From-Away’s American View
Mark M. Green
New York City and South West Margaree
It was snowing when I arrived recently at the Van Nuys Flyaway bus station in the valley, the valley that rests next to Los Angeles, over the hills passing by Sherman Oaks. Except that it was not snowing. It never snows in Los Angeles. These white particles in the air were not snow and although they covered the surface of everything around, they would never melt. This “snow” was testifying to the fact that something was wrong, and wouldn’t stop telling all of us that something was wrong until they were swept away into harmless piles and put into ash cans. Because that is what they were, ashes, ashes from fires that were raging all around us in the valley next to Los Angeles. The air smelled like a fireplace with a bad draft. Something that shouldn’t have gotten out into the air had gotten out and we were breathing this air. Something is definitely wrong and all of us waiting for taxis and cars and buses to take us elsewhere felt uneasy. Something was out-of-order.
Can we put the blame on the weather? That would help. We would feel less, or even not responsible. We try to think our way out of it. Of course! Droughts can dry the brush out to make it super flammable. But then what about those hurricanes? Oh, they are easy to understand. The rotating earth can take storms that brew in the Atlantic Ocean and turn them into swirling monsters, and find winds that push these hurricanes toward places where we live, like New Orleans. We certainly are not responsible for the rotation of the earth although some Americans might want to take credit for its positive aspects. Yes, fires are threatening our homes in the valley next to Los Angeles and yes the Gulf of Mexico rises out of her basin and drowns New Orleans. It’s just a matter of chance, the weather plays her tricks and what does it have to do with anything other than chance.
But we don’t believe it. There is a nagging feeling that won’t go away that we are being punished and we’re worried and looking around and trying to figure out what the deeper problem is. The politics of the United States demonstrates that increasing numbers of the citizens are connecting religion and politics, religion and worldly events. Is the great biblical flood on the way again? Is it fire and brimstone? Are the fires around Los Angeles and the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico the opening salvos? We look within ourselves and at each other and try to imagine what is wrong. And we don’t have to look very far. Could the ash falling on the valley next to Los Angeles be reminding us of the ash falling on the people of Iraq?
Increasingly, more and more Americans are seeing what people outside of the United States, and many within the country, saw early on, the absence of wisdom in the people who run the government, people who make decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Americans are nervous now because decisions were made that increasingly seemed based on short sightedness, or worse, decisions based on the idea of using American power to bully others into doing things the American way. Or even worse than that, decisions made to force the world to favor the financial interests of the United States. Are Americans almost ready to believe, is it possible to believe, that the events of September 11 were used to advance a hidden agenda? But even denying the bullying, and the financial interests, and the hidden agenda, are Americans beginning to realize that their leaders’ decisions arise out of incompetence – defined as the absence of foresight in a leader? In fact, the absence of foresight appears to be playing a big role. Is it possible that our leaders, as school children, never spent their Saturday afternoons at the movies? Yes, movies. There’s a source of wisdom, of foresight.
Remember the old cowboy and Indian movies? The cowboys and the troops were in their fort with high wooden walls, which were manned with lookout posts. A small war party of Indians attacked the fort with flaming arrows inflicting some damage. The large heavy wooden doors swung open and with flags waving and bugles blaring the troops rode out of the fort chasing the invaders onto the open plains, and finally into a narrow valley when the musical overture to the story suddenly took an ominous tone as the surrounding hills filled with - well you know the rest, don’t you.
This was, it is now clear, Osama-bin-Laden’s strategy. And he has been successful in drawing America into a fight on his grounds, bringing America’s soldiers, it’s young, to that part of the world where Bin-Laden could muster his forces to maximum effect. The strategy of the terrorists who attacked first overseas and then in the United States was based on the assumption that American conviction of its power would guarantee the response they wanted. The great powerful doors would open and America would march forth to meet him in battle on his terms where he is strongest, although one doubts that bin-Laden expected his great luck in that the hubris of America’s leaders would lead to an attack on Iraq, a country where he and his forces had been widely rejected and held at bay by the secular dictator in power. It would have taken a wise leader in the United States to have seen bin-Laden’s strategy ahead of time and realized the outcome the United States in now facing in Iraq and increasingly will face in Afghanistan. It would have taken foresight.
My heart breaks.