A clean-shaven young man in a khaki-colored raincoat walked into the zoo at Central Park in New York City pushing a baby carriage. He stopped to adjust the baby blanket and smiled into the carriage muttering something unintelligible. Then the bomb went off. It instantly killed the young man, thirteen other people, mostly children, and injured sixty more. Life in New York City would never be the same.

Fortunately this incident is a fiction, but don’t think it couldn’t happen here. Are you worried about foreign terrorist jihadists from Iran or Iraq or Saudi Arabia sneaking into the United States and setting off suicide bombs right here in our malls, department stores, subways, buses, transportation centers, and sports arenas? What about homegrown terrorists, good old US citizens doing these horrible acts? Is it possible that Americans would sacrifice their lives for misguided principals and hatred of our values, and if so for what and why?

I am afraid we may all be in for a real shock. It is possible. That’s right, it might just be that copy cat terrorists in this Country are dissatisfied enough with their lives, their lack of upward mobility, or the policies of our government that they find offensive, to strike at our democracy in the hopes of instilling fear and chaos in our hearts. It is possible that some of these misguided people, our own citizens, may be willing to sacrifice their own lives. In some cases they won’t even have to do that. You have all heard of remote control bombs. Maybe that is how they will create terror in our hearts.

I’m afraid it wouldn’t take too much to do tremendous damage to our economy and our way of life. The fear of more terrorist acts would probably be enough to stop people from going to malls or sporting events, or using public transportation. How long do you think it would take for tourists to stop coming to our Country and spending money? Four or five well-placed bombs might be enough to terrify our population. The fear of the unknown can be a terrible thing.

I’m not trying to scare anyone, but I think we have to take these possibilities into consideration and try and do something about them. How are we going to do that when we can’t even detect a problem student in a school who is about to go wild, and shoot some of his fellow students? How are we going to do that when we don’t even understand what makes these people act in such an anti social manner? How are we going to do that when we don’t understand what makes a terrorist take innocent lives including his or her own just to prove a point?

The answer is we are going to have to try. We are going to have to determine what social and economic conditions in our Country lead to people having no hope for a better future. We are going to have to become proactive in stopping these conditions from existing. We are going to have to guard against developing a socially and economically disadvantaged underclass in this great Nation of ours, and we are going to have to do it soon.

Today too many of our young people feel they face a future of little hope. I know this is hard to understand for most of us who do have bright futures and whose lives are full of hope, but the foreign terrorists know how to take advantage of these lost souls and make them into homegrown fiends. It would only take a few misguided people to start a panic. There are plenty of willing candidates. We have to let these people know that in this great Country of ours there is hope for a better future for all of us, and we have to make that happen quickly. We have to stop the possibility of us having to deal with homegrown terrorists before they get started. We have to try. Don’t fall victim to thinking that it couldn’t happen here. It already has.

Arthur Levine is the author of the novel Johnny Oops and the novel Home Grown Terrorist. To read more of his articles please access: http://johnnyoops.blogspot.com

© Copyright: Arthur Levine 2007