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The Crisis of Crises
By Dr. Katherine Hermes
Right now our citizenry is in a crisis of crises. We are trying to solve national and state budget problems that, if a war with Iraq occurs, will melt away at least temporarily in the public consciousness. We have been on an orange alert for a terrorist attack and medical personnel are already receiving smallpox vaccinations that may or may not, depending on which expert one believes, put the public at greater health risk (especially if Saddam Hussein does not have smallpox in his arsenal, which also may or may not exist).
None of these crises is made up entirely. Rowland vetoed the Democratic budget, and so the fiscal crisis is not only unremitting, the strategy to break the unions is unabated. State workers are being laid off, and the Connecticut State University administration has informed the faculty and staff at Central Connecticut State University and the other three state universities that up to 63 contracts for new faculty will not be renewed. We spent hundreds of thousands to recruit this new talent a year ago, and now we are telling them to look elsewhere. This action is mandated by the Rowland administration and is part of approximately 155 layoffs and non-renewals for all bargaining units across the CSU system. Our state university system, which has become one of the most admired in the country, is about to become laughable.
The health care system has also had its share of stresses. In recent teach-ins at the CSU campuses, students and teachers taught one another about the realities of this crisis. We learned about cancellation of certain services, and the rising costs associated with doing away with existing services. If mentally ill people have no place to live but the street, what happens to them when they get hurt? Hospitals, already suffering increasing numbers of visitors to emergency rooms, especially when terror alerts go up, cost more than regional mental health centers, but regional mental health centers employ the target of all targets: state employees. On a federal level, legislation known as HIPPA allows federal officials the right to seize the patient records of mentally ill people without the doctor being informed prior to the seizure or without the patient ever having the right to know.
Meanwhile, some state employees and students (they can be the same people) are being deployed on active duty to get ready for a war that is dividing opinion in this country and is meeting with firm opposition outside of it. Our tax dollars, both state and federal, have to fund this war, as there are no charitable organizations I know of that are going to pitch in like they will to help the mentally ill, cancer patients, or even wounded war veterans. To my knowledge, not once has anyone been able to link Saddam Hussein's secular regime with the zealots of al-Qaeda. I realize some people believe the circumstantial case made by the federal government, but circumstantial cases always have room for error. For how much error should we allow?
If Hussein has weapons the UN inspectors did not find, then George W. Bush will have a Pyrrhic victory as he gets to say, "I told you so." If Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction but the U.S. bombs the country and takes over its government, violating the principles of international law, what will officials say then? "Oops." It is hard to watch my students disappear from my classrooms (as it was when they went to Bosnia), hard for them to resume their lives afterward if they live, and hard for their families. Yet, if the war were a just war, we could send them off with our prayers and our gratitude. Now I just pray that I am not judged by the actions of the nation in which I happen to be a citizen, and a devoted one at that.
What is so difficult about these crises is that they create mentalities of crisis that seem to me to be of two kinds: either there is panic or there is apathy. Real-life solutions become too difficult, because the problems are too multitudinous. If we vaccinate for smallpox do we risk infecting people and starting a virgin-soil epidemic, or are we protecting our health care workers as the first line of defense? Do we let the governor solve the budget problem, or the legislature? How many letters can we write, for crying out loud? Do we allow libraries and bookstores and video stores to report to the federal government our borrowing inventories under the Patriot Act, or do we get on the phone to John Larson to just say NO? What if a terrorist borrows a book and it could be the book, the one that leads to the production of the next bomb that destroys the next tower and causes thousands of deaths? Do we care about the three professors arrested recently and should they be tried by military tribunals without habeas corpus? What is "habeas corpus" but a phrase from a dead language anyway? No one will know in a few years, because there won't be any new hires in classics to teach Latin—that's for sure.
I am not sure history repeats itself, but it can offer us insights. When the Indian peoples of New England encountered smallpox in the early 1600s, they panicked. They ran from village to village hoping someone could explain to them what this terrible thing was. In so doing, they spread the disease, causing in some cases, without intention or knowledge, nearly 90% of the population to die. Their leaders, and the men who hunted and the women who built houses and farmed, died indiscriminately. Traumatized and devastated, they drank, they drifted, they hunted for furs to sell to Europeans until there were few furs to hunt, and eventually they became so powerless that people of European descent thought the eastern Algonquians had ceased to exist. It is like a sci-fi scenario, except that it happened.
Alfred Crosby, a historian of science, recognized the problem that had escaped the understanding of historians for centuries. It was not that the Indians lacked immunity or were weaker than Europeans; it was that, besides lacking any kind of immunity, they lacked the cultural responses necessary to deal with smallpox, to which they had never been exposed. If they had merely known about quarantine, they would not have died in such numbers. Europeans, on the other hand, had centuries of dealing with plague and pox behind them. Cultural responses can dictate whether we live or die.
We have a cultural institution designed to help us cope with crises. It is called the United States Constitution. Only people who have actually read it have any right to use it, so I suggest you get a copy if you don't have one. The Constitution makes clear that the three branches of government each have their jobs to do; that the states play a role; that liberty needs protecting most when fear of too much liberty is greatest. If we remember that ordered liberty is at the center of our greatest cultural achievement, we will know what to do. We will know that the federal Patriot Act was an irresponsible reaction to a very real terror; that threats to liberty tend to come from within and not from without; that habeas corpus is a cornerstone of the structure of our representative government and not some obscure Latin phrase; that duct tape and plastic won't solve anything that the constitutional process cannot. Indeed, duct tape and plastic, and the fear behind their use, might make our crises worse.
Dr. Katherine Hermes is Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.
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