Up Yours: We’re Not Afraid Movement
Today in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution I have an Op-Ed piece that I originally conceived of with this headline:
Up Yours-We’re Not Afraid.
It tells would-be terrorists that I sense a change in America that is saying, stuff it, we are not afraid.
Now I am sure there are more polite ways of saying that, but I didn’t especially want to be polite — I wanted to be defiant.
I got the Up Yours from a headline in the Star, an English tabloid pointed to by Jeff Jarvis, which ran a headline last week saying, “Up Yours. Murdering scum foiled.”
The Journal Constitution as a conservative family newspaper didn’t want to use the expression, at least when it was not attributed. I understand that. Plus for me as a professor, it is probably better that they edited out two of my three Up Yours comments.
However, a certain punch was left out, a certain deeper more intense feeling. At times only inappropriate, profane slang can convey the real meaning of our innermost feelings. It is sometimes the very best way of making a point.
Tabloids know it. Bloggers know it. Mainstream media know it too. So if you were writing it or editing, what would you do? Or was there a tamer euphemism that I might have used. I tried but couldn’t think of one.Or am I just one more of the writing cry babies, who hate to be edited even though it is good for them? Here it is unedited:
The Up Yours – We’re Not Afraid Movement Grows
By Leonard Witt
The Up Yours – We’re Not Afraid Movement is growing in America. I saw it first in a James Fallows’ article in September’s Atlantic magazine. He wrote that al-Qaida is on the ropes, small groups will cause damage, but the risk is not worthy of full-blown panic. If we, as a nation, don’t panic, we will be able to act much more rationally and thus be much more effective at nullifying the baby killers.
I call them baby killers because they can only be terrorists if we are act as if we are terrorized. Their only real advantage is that they are not afraid of dying, while we, as a nation, are irrationally afraid that they might kill every one of us. They cannot; they can only scare us into thinking they can. If we can turn that fear into a stand of concern, precaution, courage and defiance, they have lost their advantage.
I was in India when the train bombings occurred in Mumbai. The next day, during a casual conversation with an elderly Tibetan man, I said I was going to Mumbai and was worried about the bombing. He dismissed my fear by saying, “That was yesterday.”
Yes, throughout India people were concerned, angry, saddened and bewildered by why anyone would want to wantonly kill so many other human beings and disrupt so many lives and cut so deeply into so many families. But the next day, the majority of people were back on the trains. Life went on as if nothing had happened. It was as if you received a cut on your arm and it healed immediately.
After last week’s thwarted threat in London, Jeff Jarvis, one of those bellwether bloggers, noticed a headline in the Star, an English tabloid, that read: “Up Yours. Murdering scum foiled,” and next to the headline Jarvis noted was “a picture of a smiling child at Heathrow wearing an ‘Am I Bothered?’ T-shirt.”
Ze Frank, another popular blogger, who is extremely thoughtful-but at times equally profane and sophomoric-also nails the Don’t Be Afraid factor. He said on his daily videolog:
“Now, the way I see it, you can’t have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.
“Airline industry stocks plummetted today, while the industry braced for a rash of cancellations. This, despite the fact that even with the risk of airplane bombings it’s still more dangerous to drive your car. Or smoke cigarettes.
“As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.
“London’s police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson said that the plot was ‘intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.’ No, it is imaginable: between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.”
I understand that Ze Frank is just a blogger, but what makes blogging so effective is that it is viral, just as fear can be viral, or just as fortitude can be viral. To get there we need our national leaders to abandon their fear-inducing, panic-laden alerts and we need the media to balance its fear mongering headlines with the equivalent of Up Yours – We’re Not Afraid.
Leonard Witt holds the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University and blogs at PJNet.org.
