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September 12, 2009

Stephanie Salter: Left to our own devices, we’re dividing ourselves to destruction

By Stephanie Salter

As the span of years since Sept. 11, 2001, has lengthened and the people of this nation increasingly have turned their fear and frustration on one another, I often find myself imagining Osama bin Laden and whatever remains of his original gang of al Qaida fanatics.

I see them in the dimness of the various hideouts that have served them well for eight years, using advanced technology to keep up-to-the-minute on the state of the United States of America. Always a fan of U.S. cable news, bin Laden likely tracks and observes the “infidels” he loves to hate as if we were lab rats in a huge and complex experiment.

Day after day, as the collective ugliness seems to pervade every rural nook and urban cranny of our allegedly “united” states, I see the man who prays for our extinction smiling. I see the same amused look he wore on a video, well after 9/11, in which he described to friends how surprised and delighted the 19 hijackers would be to realize that their efforts had far surpassed even their most ambitious dreams.

Always, when I imagine bin Laden now, I hear him say the same thing, with a touch of happy incredulity in his voice: “Praise, Allah. We don’t have to do anything else but watch. They are destroying themselves.”

Granted, it isn’t as though we were one big happy family before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, revealed a vulnerability few Americans ever owned. We’ve been mistrusting, stereotyping and sniping at one another throughout our relatively short history as a nation.

The Civil War was not exactly our finest hour as a people united. Internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is as dark a stain on our moral record as is slavery and our systematic takeover of the land itself from people of color who occupied it before white men and women claimed it for their own.

The life-wrecking Commie hunts of Joe McCarthy’s 1950s were spawns of the life-ending witch hunts of colonial Salem. More recently, the Vietnam War inspired deep fissures and a bunker mentality among citizens who fought it out thousands of miles from the blood and horror of actual combat.

But a combination of forces — social, economic, technological, emotional, spiritual, intractable human nature — have coalesced since 9/11 to intensify the ugly, dangerous divisions. Besides, does it really matter if previous times were worse or better?

Now is where we live; it is the only place we can control a little, let alone change. Now is the period of time we’re allotted to build (or destroy) what we will pass on as “nation” to future generations.

Is anyone out there happy in this state of anger and paranoia, of king-sized chips worn on both shoulders by liberals, conservatives, fundamentalist Christians and non-believers, alike?

Does anybody feel good wallowing in a victim mentality that insists we blame everyone else for our misery, be it OPEC for gladly cashing in on our addiction to oil or rude classmates for our own kids’ bad manners?

Does it help anyone sleep better at night to nurture a belief in a widespread, meticulously organized, impossibly secret conspiracy that is bent on tricking 200 million people into submitting to the conspirators’ evil plan for the universe?

The suspension of logic and reason (and truth) that is required to sustain and nurture all of this — the anger, paranoia, resentment, blaming and embrace of a network of plots — is mighty. Did the 19 hijackers blow up Americans’ b.s. detectors the same day they blew up the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon?

The evidence is ubiquitous, passed on from friend to relative to e-mail affinity group. “Real” news stories, quoting official-sounding police or military officers, and attributed to the Associated Press, mainstream newspapers or TV networks, turn out to be completely made up. Not embellished upon, 100-percent concocted.

Even lie-busting sites such as snopes.com are exploited. Their tireless truth-seekers shoot down false information from the left and the right, yet they find their site names offered as “proof” of the veracity of lies they’ve already debunked. (“Snopes confirms this” on any e-mail has become the surest way to send me straight to snopes.com to check the item for myself.)

I used to laugh at these “informational” missives as they circled the country. I’d watch one flare up, die down and, a year or two later, gain new life as someone in need of conspiracy or scapegoat fuel discovered it and passed it on as current, crucial and deserving of maximum outrage.

Just this past week I was sent such an e-mail. It begins with a message telling readers to guess what the attractive complex is that is pictured in a series of 12 color photos. After the last photo, the complex is identified as “New Cook County Correctional Center Chicago, Illinois.” Then comes this message:

“… guess if one ever breaks the law, do it in Illinois! (Our military should have it so good!) Once again, the taxpayer gets stung.

“In most cases, the quality of life for prisoners has improved considerably from what you might expect. And who thought prison was for punishment??!!!!! This is what is wrong here in the USA.

“This should make things a little clearer: Let’s see now … who was the Chicago US Senator who helped arrange the funds to build this beautiful ‘punishment center’. Oh yes, it was B. Obama!!! No wonder he sees nothing.”

The easily accessible truth? The prison facility depicted in the e-mail is in Austria.

How many of the thousands (or millions) of recipients who have eagerly sucked up this lie and passed it along to inflame countless others even considered verifying the message? Multiply this lie by hundreds (or thousands) and you get an idea of the negative, pernicious energy being generated and fed every minute by Americans who are pitted against their president, their government and who-knows how many of their fellow citizens.

I don’t laugh at these e-mails anymore, but I’ll bet I know someone who finds them hilarious — and an affirmation that God must be on his side or else the enemy wouldn’t be nearly so helpful.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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