Isolation not the answer

Belfast, Ireland, 1979. A train pulls out of Central Station, bound for Dublin. My wife, three sons, and I are aboard. Several minutes later, a frantic conductor is racing up and down the aisle.

'Is that your package?”

'No.”

'Is that your package?” he asks the next passenger, gesturing to a plain package in the overhead rack above an empty seat.

'No, not mine!”

'Someone was sitting there just a minute ago,” offers another passenger.

We're worried and frightened.

I remember my first hour in Belfast. Guns pointed at me - twice. By soldiers. I fit a profile, a lone male with a briefcase. The bank whose front door was locked at midday. I got in after being frisked. Nearly vacant streets in city center - parked cars were not allowed unless someone remained in the vehicle.

Northern Ireland had adjusted to terrorism.

Their 'new normal” was going about daily routines with a sharp eye for suspicious people, packages or situations - wary but realistic. In their worst year, 1972, the death toll from terrorism, when scaled to today's U.S. population, would be more than 90,000 dead. Politically unacceptable. Personally nerve-wracking.

The biblical question 'Who is my neighbor?” is relevant. Your neighbor is anyone occupying public space - like a sidewalk, a roadway, a railroad car - with you. They could save your life - or take it.

Last fall I wrote an article about the terrorist attack at the Westgate Mall in Kenya, one where Islamic jihadists killed more than sixty people in a methodical gun-and-grenade attack. My understanding of that attack was deepened by the recent HBO documentary, 'Terror at the Mall.”

As the terrorists calmly looked for fresh targets, wounded and frightened men, women, and children were hiding, crawling and whispering to whomever was nearby. Suddenly, strangers became neighbors.

Technology may be abetting the twin trends of secularization and terrorism in society. As our personal time and space become crowded with digital devices, religion and neighborliness are being squeezed out or impersonalized. The new digital divide is between ourselves and others - the fellow next door and sometimes family as well.

At the same time terrorists are using cyberspace to recruit and terrorize.

Does our national motto 'In God we trust” also imply 'In man we mistrust”? Often it should.

A man in a town near us recently shot his daughter and six grandchildren. And whether the gruesome workplace slaying in Oklahoma last week was a lone-wolf terrorist or another guy next door losing it may not matter. Both bear watching.

But what also bears watching - and strengthening - is our American ideology, a God-based concept that undergirds our national identity and individual God-given rights. World War III will likely be an ideological struggle between what America means to us and what radical Islamic jihadism means to its practitioners.

While we seek salvation and comfort from our concept of a supreme being, others - terrorists and deranged individuals - kill in the name or grip of their own concept of such a being.

One of the final scenes of the 'Terror at the Mall” documentary was one of the terrorists, having done his daily share of murdering shoppers, calmly dropping to his knees and praying to his deity. I don't understand it. I fear it.

Perhaps one consequence of these events is to strengthen another national motto, E pluribus unum

- out of many, one. We need each other and a pathway to righteousness. Strangers become neighbors in times of need, and neighbors in need should be helped.

The package in the overhead luggage rack on the Belfast train was claimed by a schoolboy who returned to his seat. We felt a new camaraderie with him and our fellow passengers. We should feel the same with all Americans.