Much of what we’ve heard suggests that more than a decade ago, before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on a sunny New York morning, we lived in some sort of age of innocence where such things did not happen, particularly in the continental U.S.
This of course defies logic and the most basic understanding of history. If you live in Guam or Honolulu, you know better than to believe “it can’t happen here.” A foreign power could and did invade and occupy Guam and largely destroyed American insular defenses in Hawaii.
If many Americans did not realize such possibilities existed, then perhaps they never went through a growing-up process like that faced by their grandfathers and grandmothers — if not their own parents — including chapters such as the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, and other widely shared personal sacrifice.
Dangers and threats are a part of our everyday life, but they have to be kept in balance with reality. One of the most disturbing things about the last decade — which, I refuse to name for the dead terrorist who made such a terrible mark on it — is that we have allowed such fears to get way out of hand.
A very great American understood this well. “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself —nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” So said President Roosevelt in 1932 as he was about to steer the ship of state into the raging seas of depression and world war.
In my opinion, we’ve had a very large taste of the political uses of fear in this past decade. What President Roosevelt feared was realized as many of our politicians used this as a cover to launch attacks on cherished American values and institutions such as the judiciary. Freedom of religion was not above attack. A simple plan to build a Muslim mosque in New York stirred rage and protest against blameless Muslim-Americans who had lived at peace with their countrymen for generations. Meanwhile, a gigantic Homeland Security bureaucracy ratcheted color-coded terror alerts up and down, in case anyone had forgotten to be very, very afraid and not vote the right way.
We’re a far better country than this and, in hindsight, we have recognized many outrages and miscarriages of justice: We took a very long road to guaranteeing civil rights to all, and the tardy reparations for the World War II Japanese internments come to mind. But we haven’t gotten around to fixing the wrongs inflicted on Guam so long ago, both the atrocities against the Chamorro people by the foreign invader and the faulty memories of their fellow Americans about this sacrifice. And I fear that in our recent days, we’ve accumulated a fresh and long list of new grievances that we’ll be apologizing for in a more enlightened time.
As we look further down the line into the 21st century, we can only hope that President Roosevelt’s optimistic view of his memorably troubled time will translate into our new century.
Roosevelt said: “In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”
SEN. JUDITH P. GUTHERTZ
31st Guam Legislature
