Fear of Them, fear of Us

I'M NOT A particularly fearful fellow. But I haven't been this frightened since, say, October 1962.


And I have two opposite but reinforcing fears. One is fear of Them. The other is fear of Us.

It's clear that we now live in a world in which Americans are no longer safe from other people's rage, justified or not. And, very likely, it is only going to get worse.

Since Sept. 11, we've gone through three stages. The first stage was: The world will never be the same; we are all vulnerable. This was only reinforced by the anthrax scare.

But the experts reassured us that Sept. 11 was a ''one-off'' - a fluke. It had been years in the planning. They had thrown at us everything they had. Our security was asleep at the switch. But now we were wide awake. Nobody would ever successfully turn an jetliner into a human bomb again.

In Afghanistan, we routed Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We dedicated tens of billions to upgrade everything from airport screenings to electronic surveillance. The anthrax turned out to be home-grown.