MEASURING OUR FEARS

Toronto Globe and Mail: The age of anxiety has begun. Just read Ask The Globe. One reader wants to know whether she should buy bottled water, lest Lake Ontario be poisoned by terrorists. Another, having just moved from Oakville to Detroit, wants to know whether she should move back. Another wants to know whether her mutual funds might collapse into worthlessness.
And then there's the Canadian military. It has given orders for its members not to be seen in uniform, except when they're actually on the base working, a tactic last seen by soldiers of the German army after the First World War when they feared being heckled and mocked on the streets.
Rational fear: The worries bring to mind an old saying: Even the paranoid have enemies. Today, all of North America is feeling cause to be worried. Everyone is figuring out how to live in an era where enemies are real, and how to be afraid in a rational way and to take reasonable precautions without verging into life-limiting paranoia. Those are the issues that the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington have raised for us all.
It is one thing when individual citizens, faced with a situation totally out of their experience, respond by questioning everything they have taken for granted in a free society. Mental-health experts call that response "hypervigilance," and say it can be a useful mechanism for regaining control. At the same time, it poses risks to an economy when thousands of people stop travelling by air or start yanking their mutual funds from the stock market. But it is entirely unfair to tell individuals that they are granting the terrorists a victory. To the terrorists, all innocents are combatants; but a free society such as ours must not accept that logic. It must insist on each person's right to find his or her comfort zone.
But when the military starts hiding its uniforms, it's a signal that, however scared you might be in your own home, however irrational your fears might be, it's all right: The army and navy commanders are cowering, too.
That's an utterly wrong message for these times. Absent some extraordinary evidence about the dangers to our military personnel on Canadian streets, the order to abandon the military uniform in public seems a futile and even humiliating bow to the terrorists' power over our daily lives.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Orange County Register: If there is any silver lining to the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, it might be that more Americans have come to think about safety and security their own and those of others -- in terms of their own personal responsibility, and taking personal action when it is endangered.
We saw it in the heroic actions of some passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania that day. And we saw it last week when a number of passengers on American Airlines Flight 1238 to Chicago helped to subdue an apparently mentally disturbed man who tried to disrupt the pilots.
It might be impossible to know what was going through the mind of Edward Coburn, 31, of Fresno, Calif., as he sat in the passenger section becoming more visibly agitated. But as the plane approached Chicago he charged up the aisle, crashed through the cockpit door and shouted things that suggested he thought the pilots were going to crash the plane into the Sears Tower. Co-pilot Vince Belser of Mission Viejo, Calif., caught him with one arm and pushed him down, allowing pilot Dean Weber to maintain control with only a bump on the head and a slight lurch of the plane.
Nylon handcuffs: Belser probably could have controlled Coburn himself. But he was assisted almost immediately by several passengers who had sprinted up the aisle to help. They stayed on the job after Coburn struggled free from a set of nylon handcuffs and kept him subdued for the rest of the flight.
On the same flight Tuesday (with a different crew) passengers subdued another passenger who became drunk and abusive and hit a flight attendant.
All this is encouraging. We wouldn't want a lot of passengers thinking they're Rambo and deciding to beat up any fellow passenger who was merely annoying. But to see passengers willing to take responsible action when a genuine problem occurs speaks well of America.
We had gotten away from that. In a Sept. 17 column for Canada's National Post columnist Mark Steyn bemoaned the "cultural passivity" encouraged by nit-picky FAA regulations on everything. He summed the situation up this way: "That was the deal: Do as you're told, and the FAA will look after you."
We have learned to our sorrow that there are times when the authorities can't protect you. Those are the times when true Americans take matters into their own hands.
The ability and willingness to assume personal responsibility is one of the strengths of this country, one of the reasons terrorists and would-be invaders will find it so difficult to conquer this often unruly land.
Way to go!
THE LIMITS OF REASSURANCE
Washington Post: Word of additional possible anthrax cases Friday made a jittery nation more so. It also gave new force to calls for the Bush administration to do a better job of reassuring Americans. What was the point of raising alarms without telling us how to behave in the face of these threats, many asked. "I'm looking for a zone of personal safety in an unsafe world," one of our colleagues told us Friday. The administration had succeeded in scaring her with its warnings of imminent attacks -- but then what?
We sympathize -- to a point. Of course the administration should share as much information as it can and provide as much context as possible for its warnings. But there is no zone of absolute safety as long as the terrorists are at large -- not on the ground or in the sky, not at work or at home. That is why America is fighting a war. Pursuing the war vigorously will ultimately provide the best defense.
Caution: In the meantime, it's worth remembering that, even if the chance is very high of an attack against Americans somewhere, the chance of danger for any one person remains very low. The best response therefore is not to cower in the cellar but to go about one's business with, as President Bush said, a measure of caution and vigilance.
Is that reassuring? Not very. The Sept. 11 attacks opened Americans' eyes to many things: to weaknesses in intelligence and law enforcement agencies, to porous borders, to many vulnerabilities about which the warnings had been copious and copiously ignored. Most of all, though, the attacks opened Americans' eyes to an enemy that had been hiding in plain sight -- an enemy that is implacable and, as Bush also said, evil in its willingness to kill innocent civilians for its ends. Those ends have nothing to do with gaining economic or territorial advantage, so there is nothing to negotiate. There is only a war to fight.
The administration should communicate the risks as fully and as artfully as possible. As time goes on, it should offer more practical advice on how to cope with those risks. It should improve, as it has set out to do, the nation's homeland defense. But most of all it needs to fight and win this war.