The World As We Know It
I was four years old on September 11, 2001, which makes me a part of the last age group to have any memories at all of the actual day. Yet, those memories aren’t much – I remember being on the playground at school and hearing this loud siren go off and my teachers rounding up all the kids and bringing us back inside. I remember they seemed scared, but I didn’t understand why. (Once I got older, I would realize that this was when the first plane hit). The only other thing I remember from that day was from after dinner that night at my house – my parents had the TV on and footage was being shown of the attack. I remember asking my dad why it was such a big deal, “it was only a plane.” My dad didn’t answer, and how could he? My four year old brain wouldn’t understand.
All I have known of the world has been post 9/11, and this has affected my thinking in more ways than I imagined. For example, I had to consciously make an effort to not use words such as ‘evil’ or ‘senseless’ in the above paragraph, and this is exactly what Lisa Stampnitzky is trying to get across in Disciplining Terror. It is the idea that “terrorism is socially constructed” (Stampnitzky 5) and this social construction has changed over time as after the 1970’s, terrorism was seen as an “inherently problematic concept” that was the act of “pathological, irrational actors” (Stampnitizky 9). This view on terrorism led to associated words such as the ones I struggled to avoid.
The act that ultimately began the shift in the undefinable definition of terrorism was “the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics” (Stampnitzky 21), as this pushed terroristic acts of violence into “the public sphere and as an object of expert knowledge” (Stampnitzky 23). However, Stampnitzky also puts forth the idea that changes and interactions within “events, experts, and techniques of knowledge” also allowed for the “emergence of terrorism” within the 1970’s (Stampnitzky 24). And, she is right. The effect of the event of the massacre during the Munich Olympics led to a difficult to define expert due to the “new discourse of terrorism [being] organized around three fundamental ambiguities – rationality, morality, and politics” which in turn, led to “difficulties [in] knowledge about terrorism” (Stampnitzky 51).
Those three changes (along with the emergence of terrorism in the public eye) led to the world that we live in today. This is a world in which we are more afraid of terrorists destroying our country than we are of our own people destroying it – just look at the 2016 Presidential Election. This is a world in which America is in a moral panic about terrorism. Yet, this is a world in which I hesitate to use the words ‘moral panic’, because that ‘moral panic’ is all I have known… and it is difficult to call your life a ‘moral panic’.
