Identity tricky to maintain in democratic state

Even if we were to turn the sands of Iraq to glass and pull down every terrorist network on… Even if we were to turn the sands of Iraq to glass and pull down every terrorist network on the planet, still we’d have to reckon with the challenge terrorism’s raised for democracy.

Democracy offered people the tyranny of a majority to replace the tyranny of a monarch, and history has proved democracy’s value in securing stability and relative justice for the people.

In our modern American republic, the tyranny is absolute and wielded by no one. Sadly, we’ve surrendered the belief that each of our voices should ring out loudly and clearly enough to be heard over the cacophony of illusions and assumptions that governs our governors.

Every individual should constantly question his own beliefs, seeking always to be aware that certainty and inhumanity are perilously close neighbors. This awareness is meant to guard against holocausts and theocracies – it should never be used as a radiant facade for apathy or a quasi-moral wall to fence out the obligation to act.

All our enterprises, particularly those of great pith and moment, have lost the name of action. Whether it’s through the saturation of images depicting past or distant greatness or because of the absence of greatness around us, our belief that it’s possible to translate outrage into change is gone. What lingers is a phantom, a fondness for protesters and the certainty that we’re free to try our hand at it, if we really want to.

In a nation that guarantees that our innate civil liberties will not be abridged, we’ve allowed the individual to be reduced to a “citizen” dependent on the government’s OK, the government’s tolerance.

If that seems an extreme claim, remember that laws targeting homosexuals are unconstitutional only because homosexual acts are protected under privacy. That would be the same privacy we can abridge for national security. There’s nothing recognizing a person’s right to be gay.

Culture has joined the political structure in submerging into the depths of “the common good” each of our rights to think and live as an individual. We have accepted it because democracy is all we can think up and our culture is all we’ve got.

Then, along came terrorism.

A terrorist act places the individual first in a way that no enduring civil society could permit. It liberates the individual from all constraints, and while we react to the violence and we rightly denounce any one person crossing certain boundaries, we refuse openly to acknowledge how terrorists have transcended the limitations placed on an ordinary individual.

A bomb can transform an inarticulate fool into a momentarily immortal demagogue. Even if his message is perverted or treated with disdain, he has changed lives. A small group of those individuals together transformed the world by pulling a few planes from the sky. It may be a perverse godhood, but if nothing else it reinforces the impotence of those who live and die merely as another citizen.

It’s that impotence that characterizes us now. There are echoes of it in our movies, novels, music and especially television. There are signs of it in the way we cling to those special songs or lines that resonate with all the things we wish we’d been able to say for ourselves.

All of this, terrorism and democracy – it’s all part of some political dialogue acting itself out through human lives. It feels distant from the real, day-to-day world. It feels that way because it is. Relevant, real or not – it’s distant.

Our lives really are about the decisions we make every day. They really do amount to a collection of trivialities punctuated, on occasion, by something grand. Life really is about the morning coffee and rush hour. It really does depend on how much you earn and if you get benefits. Where you live and how you look – these are tangible, these are immediate.

Next to things like that, however interesting it may be, the impact of the idea – not the act, the idea – of terrorism on democracy is horribly distant. It’s nearly as distant from our everyday world as are the soldiers dying in Iraq.

Burn the puppets with Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.