[Mb-civic] Running scared - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Running scared

By James Carroll  |  November 28, 2005  |  The Boston Globe

WHEN I was a boy, I delivered what was thought of as the afternoon 
newspaper, but in December I made my rounds in the dark. Always, at this 
time of year, I choke on one particular memory -- the frightened thrill 
of dashing through the last part of my paper route.

I couldn't wait for my canvas bag to be nearly empty, so that I could 
really start to run. Flinging the last of the rolled up newspapers at 
the blurry doorways, I took off for home as fast as I could go. I 
hurdled hedges, cut across lawns, one act of trespass after another: 
What did I care?

It was not the dark I was afraid of so much as my own imagination. I 
steered clear, for example, of trees whose silhouettes made me think of 
ghouls, and I was always sure that slimy night crawlers were waiting in 
the grass to snare my legs, which I kept moving. The faster I went, the 
more certain I was that someone, something was gaining on me.

I had no way of knowing that such honed fear of what does not actually 
exist is an ingenious adaptation of the human species, what enables us 
to handle it when some unexpected monster does in fact show itself. 
Dread of the ghoul behind the darkened tree, that is, prepared our 
ancestors in the vast savannah to respond when a mundane but still 
deadly beast leapt out of the bush. Those humanoids who were cursed with 
a capacity to vividly conjure the nonexistent threat defined the arc of 
natural selection that lands, eons later, on us. Just because we have 
domesticated the beasts of prey does not mean we have eliminated the 
cruelties of contingency.

Now the monster leaping out of the shadows may be a pink slip at work or 
a patch of ice on the highway or an IRS audit. It may be a diagnosis or 
a phone call at 3 a.m. If we find it possible to respond with calm and 
the focus needed to cope, it is because we rehearsed for the shock by 
picturing it countless times before it came.

All of this is to the good. Staying with my own case, I have a life 
because I have been hustling through the dark all these years, heading 
home. But such motivating fear can be a bad thing, too. When response to 
the imagined threat moves beyond the adrenalin rush that usefully 
heightens perception, to an inhibiting construction of defenses or to 
actual attacks against the dark, then, considered individually, what the 
person has fallen prey to is clinical paranoia. Considered socially, 
what we have in such reaction is the politics of terror. Alert to one 
monster, we create another.

The United States is now undergoing a great reckoning. With collapsing 
confidence in the government, obsessive debate about the war, rising 
contempt for the president, shame in relation to the plight of our young 
soldiers, acrimony at holiday tables -- ''I told you so" versus ''What 
would you have us do?" -- the nation confronts the all-too-human fact 
that our frightened responses to Al Qaeda, at home and abroad, have done 
us far more damage than the nihilist terrorists ever could have. Our 
communal dread, instead of sharpening our responses, made them reckless.

But the damage has not only been to us. It is as if the frightened 
newsboy leapt away from an innocuous shadow into the path of an 
onrushing truck, causing a terrible accident. In America's case, it was 
not a truck, but a bus loaded with children.

At one moment, the newsboy is darting among shapes in the dark, and the 
next he is staggering in the road among the groaning victims of actual 
carnage he has caused. Add to that horror the facts that more buses 
loaded with children are rushing down the road toward the accident 
scene, soon to crash, and that there is no rescue squad to call, no 
''security force."

The boy wants to split, but that seems wrong, given what he started. He 
rolls up his empty newspaper sack and offers it to one of the injured 
children as a pillow. But the next bus roars toward them. The boy sees 
nothing else to do than get out of the way. He steps off the road, into 
the shadows. He then starts running again, through the darkness.

Now the American boy knows something new, that the thing to be afraid of 
is himself.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/28/running_scared/
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