Fifty years ago this month, February 1956: Sitting in Miss Bowen’s fifth-grade music class in Park Hill Elementary School, we knew what to do when the klaxon sounded and Miss Bowen called out: “Duck and cover!” We slithered out of our chairs and under the desk, hands covering our heads for protection. I nervously glanced out the window, fully expecting to see a bright flash followed by a mushroom cloud, probably centered over Colfax and Eudora three blocks away. In those days everyone knew we were threatened by “the Communists,” who might drop a nuclear bomb any day without warning.
A couple of years later, patrol leaders in Doc Chapman’s Boy Scout Troop 28 met in his living room once a month on Sunday morning. These sessions included the good dentist’s paeans to J. Edgar Hoover, erstwhile enemy of “the Communists.”
For as long as I can remember, Americans have been threatened by someone plotting to take away our freedom. Mostly it was the Communists about to drop a bomb, or maybe meeting in cells in someone’s basement. Did those cars parked on Clermont Street in the evening belong to Communists meeting in a cell up the street? I often wondered.
In the ’60s, of course, we had to fight the Communists in Vietnam so we wouldn’t have to defend our freedom in California, if not City Park. The Cold War had turned hot.
In the 1990s, the Communists more or less went away along with the Soviet Union. But a decade later a new threat appeared – and this one was real: “the terrorists.” Not fundamentalist Muslims, mind you; these were “terrorists” who could be anywhere, even in line to board a plane, wearing shoe bombs like Richard Reid, or calling your neighbor on a cellphone.
But now it seems the constant drumbeat of threat and fear, duck and cover, for a half-century was drowning out the real threat: the threat from ourselves.
It turns out that in the United States circa 2006 you can be arrested, put in jail, never charged with a specific act, never allowed to consult a lawyer and never see a judge to protest your innocence. All it takes is the word from President George W. Bush that you are an “enemy combatant” and that may well be the last anyone hears of you.
How did Bush know you were an enemy combatant? Well, maybe the National Security Agency tapped your phone or read your e-mail without a warrant, contrary to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. After all, doesn’t the unitary executive have the right to do that, no court warrant required? Just ask the attorney general.
We have met the enemy, and it’s us. It’s us so long as we don’t rise up to defend our civil liberties with a mighty shout of “No!” It’s us so long as we don’t write Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar, “Not in the U.S.A.!”
This isn’t a country where we lock up people without a trial or a lawyer – is it? It used to be that’s what “the Communists” did. Tap our phones, read our e-mail, examine what books we’re reading at the library without any review by a court? Sounds like someone we used to take pride in resisting. Not here does the president decide unilaterally to ignore laws passed by Congress that he doesn’t particularly like – does he?
No doubt that al-Qaeda would love to repeat Sept. 11, even though I laugh at the notion that taking off my shoes before boarding a plane at DIA is going to prevent this. No, the shoe routine serves a different purpose: it underscores the sense of fear we’re all meant to feel and that’s meant to excuse the disregard for law and the Constitution, the fear that’s meant to numb our sensibilities as our individual freedoms fade and finally disappear.
I have no doubt that when our freedoms finally disappear entirely, it will be at the hands of someone who was elected urging us to duck and cover. It’s already begun.
James Oatman owns a owns a book and database-packaging firm in Boulder. He previously worked for United Press International and Reuters.
