Living With Terrorism Fears

The news lately has been filled with headlines telling us that Al Qaeda is planning a major attack on the United States sometime this summer. We even know the list of major events (the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, for instance) that might be targeted.

It would be easier to panic about this news if we had not already known that Al Qaeda would love to hit us any time they can get another strike organized. They made that crystal clear on September 11, 2001, and they still hate us enough to die for the pleasure of killing us.

Living with the daily threat of terror is a nerve-wracking experience. Some days it seems unbearable, especially for those who live in places like Washington and New York. Such daily insecurity is not a situation that Americans have often had to face in our history. Protected by two oceans and friendly neighbors north and south, we have most often walked our streets without fear of foreign enemies.

And yet such fears have not been altogether absent in our history. In the colonial period and on the frontiers, the settlers often faced the realistic threat of Indian attack. The Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and various skirmishes in between all were contexts in which Americans had to become accustomed to the threat of attack on their own soil. People had to learn to protect themselves and prepare for violence while trying to go about their daily business as normally as possible.

The Cold War also involved moments in which tensions were so great that war appeared imminent. In that case we feared a global nuclear war, a war that threatened to annihilate hundreds of millions of people in a matter of hours or days.

I was reminded of how profoundly fearful some of those days were, when I stumbled across a speech I gave as a college senior in 1984. In that speech, I talked about how desperately afraid our generation was, or at least I was, of dying in a nuclear war. I compared this apocalyptic

that nuclear Armageddon might bring down history's curtain to the apocalyptic

held by many in the early church that Jesus would soon return. Could it be, I asked, that we were living at the end of history and that our generation would not live out its days?

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