Sherry Chandler » The Age of Terror
The Age of Terror
Here is a passage May Sarton wrote on December 5, 1974 in a journal published as The House by the Sea (W.W. Norton, 1981). She was 62 when she wrote it:
I have a leaden feeling when I wake up and need to shake myself awake like a dog. But the lead is in my mind, of course. It is not only the coming on of winter, but the coming on of old age that I shore up against these days. At all ages we are learning how precarious life is, as it slowly penetrates consciousness that we live in a dying civilization. It was dreadfully borne in on me when the UN allowed Arafat, a holster showing under his shirt, to speak, and so sanctified the most brutal terrorist organization in the world. At that moment something went out of us all in the West. Trust that the generality of nations would stand, at least theoretically, for justice under law? “The Age of Terror,” Paul Johnson calls this one in the New Statesman (November 29). …Now the truth is out—there is no court of higher appeal, no public generality to express revolt. We are all in the same boat and the boat is commanded by thugs.
…It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
One might even make a distinction between terrorism for an ideal or a dream such as the PLO and that which we condone here at home, violence for no reason, as a game or a way of snatching a few dollars. Are we in the West on the way out partly because we have provided our people with almost everything except an ideal?
What struck me, as I read this passage this morning, was how little things have changed, except possibly to get worse. Ararafat is dead, of course, but Hamas is now in power in Palestine. The UN is even less able to exert “justice under law.” The boat is still (or once again) commanded by thugs.
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