Violence... The story so far

Op-Ed: Duane Sweeney 2001

The 9/11 attack is like an invasion of a virus. The virus is composed of some collection of mental/emotional genes including hatred, anger, destruction, self-other thinking and more.

Our body politic is developing an immunization response, getting pickier about what comes in, checkpoints to identify pathogenic substances and molecules (people at critical systems entrance points), and so on. Also developing ways to shut down nourishment (money) to these "cells" as we call them, and to their organizing principles (the main infection site, perhaps).

All this is natural and healthy. A person's body is healthier if it faces some challenges. The danger is that we will overreact, which is like developing an auto-immune disease, where we begin consuming our own healthy cells (people and systems) in a hyperactive attempt to protect ourselves. This would be destruction or erosion of civil rights, discrimination against foreign nationals and naturalized citizens without reason, etc.

The infectious agent is not Arabs, Islam, or even terrorism. It is anger, hatred, fear, the idea that we can solve our problems by destroying others. If we adopt those attitudes, the infection will have been successful. If our immune response takes us to careful awareness of what is and is not acceptable behavior based on a heightened awareness of justice and civil rights, respect for human life and regard for what is right, we will be able to use this act as a vaccination of the global body-politic. With that result such actions by anyone will become more and more unacceptable. If that happens, these acts will really backfire as an attack. That is the highest response I can imagine.