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I posted a variant of this a few days after the September 11th attacks on the frankie.ca main page. Four years later, what with all of the bad things happening in the world, it still reminds me of what we really need to be afraid of.

How does one deal with immense disaster? Perhaps you might hold everything inside until all you can do is talk about it with anyone who will listen.

It is hard to fully describe the dreadful events in the United States on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. The attack of the World Trade Center towers defies description. The destruction was so complete, the casualties so high, that primitive language somehow seems insufficient to fully describe the horror of the event. There is no other terrorist attack in recent memory which has killed so many people at once. The news media have been struggling to rationalise it ever since.

Most Canadians are not close to anyone who was killed or injured there and much of the emotion we feel is not the personal kind, but the empathic kind. When thousands of innocent people die, you can’t help but to feel sad for the friends, families and countrymen of those who were killed.

What is very real for many of the people around the World is the fear.

There is a fear that an airplane is going to crash into your home. Or the next flight you’re on will get hijacked. Or a bomb will explode outside your office. Or a chemical weapon will be unleashed in your home town. Or nuclear weapon be will detonated in your largest city.

Surely this is an unfounded fear. Most of us don’t live in a place with any important buildings. It would be hubris to think that anything in our mostly insignificant countries is really a target compared to the United States. In truth, all of the NATO countries are politically and militarily insignificant compared to the U.S., which is likely why the targets were what they were. Still, when the Prime Minister commented about the attacks later that Tuesday, he didn’t just sound sad, he sounded scared.

By the time Thursday rolled around, most people had more or less accepted the fact that the attack had actually happened. The media began to notice at this time, perhaps morbidly so, that the hospitals in New York were not being flooded with casualties like they had expected because most of the WTC victims were dead.

People had perhaps fooled themselves into thinking that the chances of surviving the collapse of 110 stories of burning skyscraper were any better than poor.

At that point, being a rescuer was probably more horrific than it was heroic. By Sunday, workers had already moved 25 thousand tonnes of debris. Ultimately, they would need to move another 1.5 million more tonnes.

Maybe the fear isn’t so much about the exploding airplanes, but about how quickly, and maybe permanently this single attack has changed the World and the American people, far more than the attack on Pearl Harbor it is being compared to. While it may make them stronger, it might also make them paranoid, isolationist, militaristic, and aggressive.

It may make them a lot like the people who did this to them in the first place.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was America’s president during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Long before the Second World War started he stated in his first inaugural address that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He was speaking of the Depression, but the quotation is well applied to terrorism too.

Long after the dead have been mourned, the crippled have been comforted, the injured healed, and the ruins cleared away, there will still be the fear. Only when the fear is conquered can the war be won.