Over the past two weeks, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose has been warning residents to take precautions at school, at work, at home and at every place in between. Chief Moose's team has been working around the clock to catch the ruthless sniper who has already killed nine people and wounded three more as they went about the most mundane of daily tasks. The greater Washington, D.C. area is reeling from the sniper's deadly accuracy, from the disparate choice of victims and from the "I Am God" card allegedly left at the scene of one of the murders.
Men and women throughout the country have compared the sniper to a terrorist. They note that like a terrorist, the sniper targets innocent civilians doing nothing more than going about their lives. Like a terrorist, the sniper attempts to make the victim a symbol for the greater community: "I'm going to make you petrified of everyday life." With the altered schedules and general community lockdown, we must wonder if the sniper, like the terrorist, is surreptitiously scaring us into submission.
Nobody can know if the sniper is pursuing any sort of political agenda beyond inspiring fear. But one thing is abundantly clear: the growing regional alarm and general national anxiety is due to the work of one, possibly two individuals. The comments made by Montgomery County's residents are strikingly similar to the cries of despair heard after Sept. 11. How can a single individual or a small cell of individuals possibly cause so much harm and distress?
It is the awareness of one person's potential for great destruction that is most unsettling to me and, I believe, to our generation. How can we, idealistic young adults, enter a world where it seems so easy for a single person to do great evil and so difficult for a single person to do great good? Theories abound about why it takes a millisecond to hurt many and a lifetime to help a few. But in the end, none of them solve the problem. This is the world we live in, and we must come to terms with it. This may well be the struggle that marks our days.
Our parents grew up in a world that was defined by two powers. The conflict was clear. While often dangerous, the battle between communism and democracy could be understood. Today, however, we're no longer dealing with superpowers. It's easy to say that today our enemies are those who oppose the sanctity of life and concept of liberty. But it's not so easy to identify our enemies anymore, where they come from or what motivates their actions. A "Terrorist of One" could have any number of ultimate agendas, all carried out through the use of indiscriminating destruction. Thousands of them are impossible to identify and overwhelming to combat.
Are we collectively terrified yet? And if we are, then how can we live our day-to-day lives? Where should we draw the line between protecting ourselves and allowing terror to run our lives? How can we say enough is enough, if we don't even know how to address the problem?
The U.S. Army's new slogan is "An Army of One." The Army is inspiring the individual to take responsibility for the community. Why are we leaving such a large task only up the army? Each of us needs to do the same thing.
If our community is made up of individuals, then we each need to step up to the plate. Stepping up to the plate means taking risks. We're not the ones directly responsible for the random killing of our neighbors, but we do have an individual responsibility to our local and national community. This responsibility means maintaining the ideals of our community. It means saying to those who want to destroy -- not to criticize -- the community that destruction will have no place. Their choice of violence is unacceptable to a society that values free speech and the democratic process above all else.
The fact that it is undeniably easier to do more harm than good is distressing and potentially paralyzing. This is not the world we want to live in, and it's not the world we want our children to live in either. But just because we hate a fact does not mean that it doesn't exist. While it is overwhelming to attempt to make a positive impact in a greatly unjust world, to abdicate trying is to legitimize the terrorists. This is our responsibility to our community.
