Let's put terrorism in proper perspective. Listen up America!

Terrorism is not a new thing in America. It did not begin with September 11, 2001. Perhaps, as much as any thing, this country was founded on terrorism. Ask Sitting Bull and Chief Osceola, native Americans, who know as much about this country as anyone, or the black Seminole leader, John Horse. For two hundred and forty-four years Americans of African descent were held in slavery by terrorists. Regarding this matter, listen to the confessions of Nat Turner, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Tubman. After President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and following a bloody Civil War and a brief Reconstruction period, the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups, aided and abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court's "Plessy vs. Ferguson" decision that declared segregation - "seperate but equal" - to be constitutional and legal, for more than sixty years, lynched, abused and denied Americans of African descent their civil rights, including the right to vote. Even today in America some home-grown terrorists are actively attacking other groups as they conduct their business.
The history of "unequal opportunity terrorism" is replete and extends over the entire life-span of America. Terrorism is well and alive today. But with the terrorists' 9-11-01 attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., that killed more than 3000 people, terrorism in the minds of Americans has taken on a new and urgent meaning. A part of that new meaning is: (1) that terrorism is being committed by non-Americans against Americans in America and (2) the fear of terrorism is no longer just an obsession of certain non-majority Americans who are usually members of groups with little power being attacked by home-grown terrorists, but a dreadful concern of all Americans...all the way from the White House to the poor house. What's new about terrorism in America? For the first time in the history of America there is "EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TERRORISM." I cannot help but recall my boyhood days growing up in Alabama when I had a fear of most white people because some of them were terrorists who attacked and abused people my complextion. When I was still in my twenties and a pastor of the Bell Street Baptist Church in Montgomery the Montgomery Bus Boycott was launched. I was elected to be the original secretary of the Montgomery Improvement Association that provided organizational leadership for the bus boycott. After Americans of African descent had boycotted buses for over a year the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation laws of Montgomery were unconstitutional and the buses were integrated. As a last-ditch assault in honor of their commitment to supporting segregation and the defiance of integration die-hard segregationists, racist terrorists to be sure, in the wee hours of the morning of January 10, 1957, bombed four chuches and two parsonages in Montgomery. I was the pastor of one of those churches, the one that was the worst damanged. It was rebuilt under my pastoral leadership.* Six years later, on Sunday morning, September 15, the racist terrorists put powerful dynamite to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four young Americans of African descent girls who were attending Sunday school. (I had once preached in that church when it was without a pastor.)
Today, as I listen to people, including news media spokespersons and their guests, I am aware of a striking similartity in the feelings they have to those I had during my boyhood days. Americans fear the terrorists and feel that they could be attacked at any moment, even during those times when the Government has not announced that the country is on "high alert." Most Americans realize that the Government didn't know that the terrorists was engaged in an assault against America until after the Twin Towers were aflame.
No one asked me, but as I see it, the only solution against terrorism in America is for the Government to: (1) launch an all-out-assault against "unequal opportunity terrorism," in America that is being committed by home-grown terrorists, (this is somewhat like "charity begins at home...") and (2) institute and implement a policy that respects all people everywhere and honor their landmarks, being careful not to disturb or remove them.
If I am capable of having any fear it is this: the actions and reactions of Americans toward other nations since 9-11-01 will only serve to increase, not decrease, terrorism in America. All Americans, not just those who blazoningly display, at least in rhetoric, their patriotism banners, feel the pain of the deaths of 3,000 people on 9-11-01, who were murdered by terrorists. But think for a moment of the many more people in America who have been murdered by home-grown terrorists.
Today there is "equal opportunity terrorism" in America and it is likely to get much worse than it is unless we invoke a different philosophical paradigm than the one we are pursuing. Be assured that fear is not one of the weapons in our arsenals that will serve us well at present or in the future. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said at another time in history when Americans faced a crisis of monumental proportion: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." May these words spoken by the Prophet Zechariah help us to claim our sanity before it is too late: "Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord Almighty." (Zechariah 4:6 NIV)

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*For the complete story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as told by an insider of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, read "Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott - My Personal Story" by Uriah J. Fields. It can be purchased through Authorsden.com.

Copyright 2003 by Uriah J. Fields