September 15, 2001

MEASURE TERROR'S COST AGAINST NATION'S POWER

Without in any way diminishing the magnitude of Tuesday's attacks, I note that it is indeed possible to exaggerate their importance. America crippled? Humiliated? Brought to its knees? No, I think not.

I beg your indulgence to understand that I am not belittling the anguish of the families who have lost someone they love, who will forever have a hole in their hearts. But in times of stress I tend to count things, a peculiar but occasionally useful trait.

As I write there has been no final announcement of casualties, but the numbers are tending to converge toward a total somewhat above 5,000, an enormous toll of suffering and loss. But -- given that the country's population has doubled since 1941 -- it is a loss equivalent to Pearl Harbor. America was not crippled by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor; it was galvanized. To the ultimate regret of those who planned and carried out the attack, it should not be necessary to add.

New York, where most of those people died, is a city of 8 million. To lose one in a thousand of them, even in a previously inconceivable catastrophe, is a grievous injury because of the way it happened, but not a lethal blow.

And in a nation of 281 million, 2.3 million people die every year, more than 6,000 every day. We mourn Tuesday's dead as individuals, every one unique and precious. But their loss will scarcely show in the statistics (which is why statistics is such a cold and unfeeling subject).

In part this act of war was possible because America is an open and free society, where people who wished us ill could move in with their families and take flight training and send their kids to school. But we highly prize living in an open and free society, and we should be prepared to pay a very high price for continuing to do so.

As, indeed, we were already doing. More than 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents, a death toll we could almost entirely eliminate by giving up our freedom to travel conveniently where and when we wish. Yet virtually no one chooses to do so.

Is this an economic calamity? No. In a $14 trillion economy, one cent in $10 -- the amount of the football stadium tax -- amounts to $14 billion. As a nation, we can afford the equivalent of a few football stadiums.

Yes, the economy was teetering on the brink of recession and maybe this will tip it over. But you know what? We used to have recessions nearly half the time, and more than once we had a depression.

During World War II, we spent nearly half of everything the nation produced prosecuting the war, for years on end. In comparison, this financial loss is a pinprick. President Bush asked Congress for $20 billion and Congress voted to give him $40 billion instead.

The attacks may have changed the culture of America, but not obviously to the perpetrators' advantage. A week ago, anyone who spoke of sending ground troops to Afghanistan would have been thought a madman. Now it has become a serious option with a considerable amount of public support.

Americans won't accept casualties? We do if we have to.

``Before, you could scare us home,'' my son remarked, ``as long as we thought home was safe.''

He meant that if home isn't safe, scaring us doesn't work as well as it did before.

The fate of the fourth hijacked plane, which crashed in Pennsylvania, demonstrated how quickly and completely new priorities are established. Those passengers knew about the World Trade Center, and decided to save others rather than trying to save themselves.

News reports say that a man from San Ramon, Calif., called his wife from the plane to say, ``I know we're all going to die -- there's three of us who are going to do something about it.'' And apparently they did.

If passengers and crew of a hijacked plane must believe their lives are already forfeit, as they will, then they have nothing to lose from resistance. This particular dastardly plan will not work again.

There will be other plans, maybe even more deadly than this one, and there can be no guarantee in a free society that all of them will be thwarted. It is not worth abandoning our liberties for a trifling improvement in our safety.

The terrorists and their shadowy backers underestimated American strength and resolve, but why should we make the same mistake?

(759 words)