The New Republic of Fear
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
September 14, 2003

	Ben Franklin said the way to be safe is never to be secure.  I want to talk this morning about our current obsession with security., and how that is taking us away rather than towards true safety.
	I was in Logan airport the other day waiting for my troubadour wife to get back from one of her jaunts.  I was sitting on a seat in a corridor on the first floor of terminal C, right next to the mens rest room.  A middle aged man came up with a luggage cart which had three athletic bags on it and a cage of tennis balls.  He left the cart right next to where I was sitting and entered the rest room.  Just at that moment, I head the PA come on with the standard announcement about no leaving luggage unattended and reporting all unattended luggage to airport security.  The thought flashed through my mind that this well-tanned apparent tennis player might actually be a terrorist, and I was about to be blown to kingdom come by the bomb hidden in his gym bags.  Of course, a minute later he emerged from the rest room, and pushed his cart towards the taxi stand.  
	The risk was highly improbable, but after the attacks of 9/11 few Americans would call it unreasonable.  If I had gone to fetch a security person to paw through this fellow’s luggage while he was away from it for a minute, I would only have been doing my duty.
	Fear seems to have become the dominant emotion in our public life since the September 11 attacks.  On this second anniversary of the attacks, I think the dead can be mourned and the heroes honored most by a good hard look at what has happened to the ethos of this country in the past two years.  
	Now fear, as I have said before, is at base a useful emotion.  We evolved the instincts of fear to keep us out of danger.  It is fear of the lions that kept our ancestors in the trees at night and allows us to be here at all to talk about it.  But misplaced fear can paralyze, can stultify life. The free man or woman is not one who has no fear, but who has come to know her fear and deal with it.
	I expect that each of us remembers with crystal clarity where we were on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the feelings we had as we learned what had happened.   I was attending a funeral, as it turned out.  The Judys, a couple I had married the year before, were in the hospital having their first baby. Many of us witnessed on live TV some part of the tragedy unfolding, and those who weren’t close to a TV set that hour saw it played a thousand times on newscasts for the next several days.  Although it was viewed from a distance, it was as public a mass murder as there has ever been in human history.  Most Americans, in fact most citizens of the world, have seen images of the events which directly led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people.
	We know that people are traumatized from witnessing crime.  One of the most brutal criminals I ever worked with had witnessed his father kill his mother when he was nine years old.  The images of this mass murder have hit us as a people at a level below that of rational thought, at the level of our sense of well-being.  This week I watched the Ric Burns film on public television about the building and destruction of the World Trade Center.  It was difficult to get the courage to turn on the movie, but I’m glad I did.  Besides having a little bit of Jacqueline in the soundtrack, it helped put the events of 9/11 into perspective.
	We rely in our day to day lives on our reason.  But reason is no match for fear.  Last year, a couple of Harvard professors named David Ropeik and George Gray published a book called Risk, a practical guide for deciding what’s really safe and what’s really dangerous in the world around you.  The whole point of the study was that the things we are most afraid of are not the things that are likely to do us in, in the long run.  The study found that the actual health risks from
pesticides, water pollution, hazardous waste, mammograms, and nuclear radiation are lower than many people believe, while the health risks from alcohol, air pollution, solar radiation, accidents in the home, and  medical errors are much more serious than many people realize.  Statistically, the thing that’s most likely to kill you is not the bomb that the guy in the next seat has smuggled on board the aircraft, but the cheeseburger you are about to consume, and all the ones you ate before that.  Are you wearing your sunscreen today?  Did you buckle up?
	The study also found that the types of things we are concerned about are pretty constant throughout the population, but that the overall level of fear is greater among women and nonwhites.  White males have a lower level of fear, and the authors think this is because white males have a greater sense of control over their lives.
	Control.  We all want some sense of being in control, and when other people can do us harm, we feel things are out of control.  The present administration has tried to assure us that it is taking control by tightening the borders, by cracking down on security at airports, by harassing those Americans of Middle Eastern ancestry, and by issuing color coded alerts
just to remind us to be afraid.  A few months ago, about the time we invaded Iraq, someone sent me a linguist’s analysis of the president’s rhetoric.  In all his speeches, the underlying or subliminal message is you are powerless.  We’re in a heap of trouble and there’s nothing you can do about it and your only hope is for me to do what I’m doing so you better support me.
	We have seen, sadly, the limitations of the approach of the current administration.  The fact is that they are acting on bad assumptions; the fear that the American people had following the events of 9/11 made them naturally rally around the administration, and the administration decided that fear was its most successful product line both for domestic and foreign uses.  It set about trying to intimidate the rest fo the world into doing things its way.  But the tough-guy approach has backfired.  Iraq is a much more dangerous place to American interests than it was six months ago,  we have captured neither Saddam Hussein nor Osama ben Laden, but the aggressive American policies in the whole region have radicalized a whole new generation of Muslim men, giving ready recruits for Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Al Quaeda and similar organizations.
	Last weekend the Globe noted a useful historical parallel between our present mess and the situation which Teddy Roosevelt inherited when he became president on the assassination of President McKinley in 1901.  For years, America had been threatened by a terrorist movement known as anarchism.  It grew up as a reaction to the industrial revolution, and it had fomented many acts of violence here and in Europe.  McKinley’s assassination was only the latest in a string of violent anarchist acts.  Roosevelt’s insight was that not only did he have to crackdown on the anarchist movement as a whole, but he had to do something about the conditions which induced people to join it.  So he proposed the first remedial measures to rein in the robber barons of capitalism, and proposed the first strands of what would become the social safety net under his cousin Franklin thirty years later.  
	So here, if the administration was not so keen to exploit the fears of US citizens for their own short-term political advantage, they might see that the very existence of radical Islamic movements is a result of the trend inside capitalism which we call globalization.  Professor Robert Wright of Princeton wrote a keen piece in the New York times this week pointing out just this.  The World Trade Center was the very symbol of globalization, the force that, more than any Western military might, was perceived by Islamic fundamentalists as a threat to their ways of life.  The irony us that the 9/11 terrorists used the technology of globalization – cell phones, the internet, skyscrapers, jet planes –  against its principal symbol.  
	Well, we can’t correct the myopia of the present administration, but we can determine how we are dealing with the trauma of September 11 in our lives.  We can determine not to be paralyzed by fear, but to learn from the tragedy how precious life is.  In the Ric Burns film, former Governor Mario Cuomo says this:
“Look, what this reminds you of is the importance of your own life, and making the most of it, because you can lose it in a flash. And if that's all you learned from 9/11, that's all you remembered, that: My God, you could extinguish life so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and it could happen to me, and therefore I should think harder about the way I spend my life instead of just wasting it. Now, it's not going to teach you what to do with your life, but it will teach you to do with your life, and to do it more and quicker and better. And that can be extremely valuable. I -- It's had that effect on me.”
	In fact the most memorable images of that film about the building and destruction of the World Trade Center were not the pictures of 9/11 of 2001, but the segment focusing on a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit.  In 1968, Petit had been a teenager in Paris and one day he went to the dentist for a toothache.  He was leafing through some magazines and saw a drawing of the model for the twin towers, superimposed on the Eiffel tower to give it scale.  Petite was not a tightrope walker at the time, but he was suddenly seized with the desire to walk between the two buildings on a high wire.  He was so consumed with this idea, that he tore the page from the magazine, and sneezed to cover up the sound, and then was so embarrassed by what he had done that he left the office and made an appointment with another dentist.  
	But he bided his time and trained in wire walking, and in 1974, he stowed away in the top of one tower overnight, and with some confederates, he made history the next morning as he stretched a wire between the two towers and then stepped out on it.  The pictures are simply amazing, and here is how he summed up the whole experience:
“Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition that's where life starts. That's where you start feeling yourself living. So when my I found myself one foot on the wire, one foot on the building, and ready to decide to shift my weight to become a bird it was not something new. [And] After a few steps, I knew I was in my element. I didn't even took the full length of the crossing to get to know the rigging and the vibration of the building and the wire. And then, very slowly as I walked, I was overwhelmed by a sense of easiness, a sense of simplicity. And actually I can be seen on the first pictures smiling, smiling probably out of disbelief. It's so easy, after all those years and months of ups and down and detours, victories and disasters. Finally I was carrying my life on a path that was the simplest, the most beautiful, and the easiest.“
	This is the strongest antidote to fear that I know of.  I can’t imagine putting my foot out onto a wire a quarter mile above the sidewalk.  But I guarantee if I had that kind of courage I wouldn’t worry much about whether the guy next to me on the airplane was a terrorist.
	This is real living, this is finding what our bliss is and following it.  It is grabbing life by the lapels and refusing to settle for anything less than full-tilt living of it.	And we have another, more somber example of this in the image of all those firemen going into the burning towers to try to rescue all they could at the probable cost of their own lives.  Here’s what Mario Cuomo said about that:
“We had this fantastic contradiction of people who hated you so much that they were willing to give up their life to take yours, and people who loved humanity so much that they were willing to run into the darn building, in the smoke and flame and -- just to save the life of somebody they never met. And that's ineffably beautiful. There's no better definition of "love." There's no -- There's no more inspirational, no more inspiring, no more near to saintly conduct that you can think of, than what they demonstrated.”
	So the events of September 11 give us plenty of basis for fear, and if that is how we choose to live, there will be plenty of politicians waiting to exploit it.  But there are other models to be gotten from those events, models of love and of courage, of what I have called dancing in the face of death. 
	Tim Ashton our Mass Bay District Executive, gave a sermon the other day in which he maintained that Jesus’ real message can be stripped down to three words: “go for it.”  In the gospel of Matthew (11:16)  Jesus says  "But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.”  The loss of all those lives was a call to us to live our own lives as if they mattered, not to pursue some false chimera of security which no government is capable of delivering anyway.
	When I married Jacqueline Schwab, I married into the community of devotees of English Country dancing and English ritual dancing.  That community lost two people in the World Trade Center attack, both of whom, ironically, were members of the same Morris dance team.  One was on Flight 11.  The other was at the restaurant at the top of one of the towers known as Windows on the World.
	This August, I attended English Dance week at Pinewoods camp in Plymouth.  At noontime each day, the whole camp would gather for sort of a show and tell session, and we would sing a song or do a dance or play a game.  On the last day of camp, the gathering was turned over to a woman who had been sound engineer all week and also sometimes played oboe at the evening dances.  Before she played, she told us her story: how she had grown up as a perfectionist, had gone to Julliard, but she had soured on playing classical music professionally because in her judgement she was never good enough.  So she got into theater, and became adept at all kinds of backstage work such as running sound.  She got married, but at some point it seemed she and her husband were going separate ways.  
	But then she started going to folk camps and at one in the summer of 2001, she met a fiddler who was self-taught and played the fiddle all wrong from a classical point of view.  But he had the most wonderful rhythm and drive, and he showed her what was important in music was not how good you were at making it, but how much of yourself you put into it.
	She got inspired, and took out her oboe again, and started just playing everything she ever wanted to play on it.  She had removed a major blockage in her thinking.  She called her husband.  It turned out he had also just removed an obstacle in his life by getting a job he really wanted: he was going to be the new wine steward at Windows on the World, which some reviewers called the best restaurant anywhere.  She recounted the conversation, and told us that it seemed that both of their lives had turned corners for the best.  She thought they might even have a future together.  That conversation was on September 8, 2001, and it was the last one they had.
	She told us that the death of her husband did not cause her to retreat from her music.  As she thinks about it now, she feels him encouraging her to explore more deeply and passionately the music she loves.  She finished talking, sat silently for a few minutes, and then played a classical piece that was straight from her heart to all of ours.
	Fear, my friends, may be a natural by-product of the events of September 11, but it is not good basis for living our lives, either as a nation or individually.  Let us resolve to live our lives to the fullest, letting every moment count. 
	On the film, Mario Cuomo hoped that the memorial to those who lost their lives on 9/11 could somehow reflect the wisdom of the world’s religions:
“I would like to see some depiction of all the religions list them all: atheism, ethical humanism, Catholicism, etc., etc. All of them. And you notice that each of those religions, these value systems, have two principles they share in common. And the two principles started with monotheism and the Jews: tzedakah and tikkun olam. [Tzedakah] means generally: we must treat one another as brother and sister. We should show one another respect and dignity, because we are like things. We are human beings in a world that has nothing else like us. And we ought to treat one another with love, charity-use your own words. And the second principle is: Well, what do you do with this relationship? Well, we don't know exactly how we got here, why we got here, etc., etc. That's for minds larger than ours. But we know that we are like kinds, and we should work together to make this as good an experience as possible. Tikkun Olam -- let us repair the universe. Now Islam believes that. Buddhism that has no god believes it. Every ethical humanist I ever met believes it. Those two principles: we're supposed to love one another and we're supposed to work together to make the experience better. That's all the religion you need, really, to make a success of this planet. And I'd like to see that in 9/11 somewhere. I'd like to see that captured somehow.”
Amen.