The New Face of the Enemy

You have to start off with the fact that there

enemies. We were attacked and, at the moment, the dominant thing that people have to deal with is the grief, the sorrow, and the sense of loss, not only of the lives lost but of our lost innocence.

We have perched up on this high catbird seat of our own special privilege, wealth, and safety since the Second World War-- even during that war. But, as the Buddha reminds us, life is suffering. Most human beings live in daily danger, with wars and rumor of wars, with refugee problems. We thought that we were just about to enter into the alabaster city undimmed by human tears. We've suddenly been jolted into reality, and from now on we're going to be living with a sense of danger.

So what do we do? Our first response is to use a very old idea of the enemy to try to get us back to the old world. With the old faces of the enemy--the ones I talked about in my book, "Faces of the Enemy" (Harper and Row 1986)--we're dealing primarily with the emotion of fear and hate. Here's an enemy, we fear him. We know who he is. He's a Hun, he's a Jap, or he's an American pig but he has a face. Over that face we put another face, of an atheist or a barbarian or some kind of an animal, and this allows us to kill him. We retaliate, we strike out, which makes us feel better; it relieves our anxiety.

Now what's happened is very different. I'm just talking psychology, not actual fact, but, according to the mass mind, we have been hit by somebody. We don't know who they are. We don't know where they came from. We don't know why and we don't know when they will strike again. All we know is that everything is different.

What that has created is not fear but anxiety, and there is a vast difference between fear and anxiety. Fear has a concrete object, anxiety doesn't. You can't marshal much against anxiety. When we use the old image of the monster, of Satan, and of pure evil, we're trying to get into that old enemy psychology. We would feel so much better if we can bomb somebody and especially if it's Osama bin Laden.

As I tried to point out in my book, the only way to lessen the eternal circle of violence is by stopping knee-jerk retaliation; We have to sit and think for a long time about what we want to do, how to punish those who are guilty.

There was a picture in the paper that showed followers of Osama bin Laden holding up a great big sign that says, "Americans, think. Why are you hated all over the world?"

Continued on page 2: »