Barry Farber
Monday, March 22, 2004

We are going to get hit. The warning comes at us from multiple sources ranging from Henry Kissenger to common sense.

Everything America has done since 9/11 MIGHT protect us against another series of big-plane hijackings. Then again, it might not. What is certain is that there is nothing to keep one or more – or many – “Spains” from shattering our treasured post-9/11 “normalcy.”

The weekend after the bombs went off in Madrid, AMTRAK refused to send anybody to appear on talk shows. Scary! And smart, too. Our passenger train executives realized there was no way to offer any reassurance to the American rail-riding public without lying!

Are commuters supposed to get to the train two hours early for security screening? How about subway riders? During the Cold War, European communists used to joke about their most primitive ally: Albania.

“Have you heard about the new Albanian anti-aircraft weapon?” they’d ask. When the reply came back in the negative, the jokester would clench a fist and shake it in the direction of the sky, accompanied by an angry frown. Do we have anything better today to safeguard our trains, buses, subways, malls, concerts, etc.?

I can suggest something from personal memory that’s worth a try.

Join me at the time of Pearl Harbor. That was a much less frightening time for most Americans. We knew the Japanese had hit us hard that Sunday morning in December of 1941 in Hawaii and by the next day we knew their forces had invaded the Philippines and what is now Malaysia and Indonesia.

We didn’t know where the enemy would strike next, but we knew it would be “over there”! We knew they could not hit us here at home. Today we know they can hit us anywhere – from Budapest to Baltimore, Madrid to Minneapolis.

A spirit of universal participation enveloped America after Pearl Harbor. It was more than widespread. It was total. Everybody took part in the war effort. It was no myth; housewives did indeed become “Rosie the Riveter.” Boy Scout troops roamed our fields and forests looking for scrap metal – even empty toothpaste tubes, which were made at that time out of precious tin.

At the age of 12 I became an air raid warden’s messenger, patrolling the neighborhood on my bicycle making sure no shaft of light pierced any neighbor’s blackout curtains during air raid drills. Never mind that this was Greensboro, N.C., a target probably not even on Nazi maps, much less among Nazi intentions. We were in it. We were ALL in it.

Bandage rolling, kitchen fat collecting, war bond selling, reservoir watching, victory gardening; nobody had to exhort us or force us. Spiders weave webs. Beavers build dams. Stricken populations rally. Or at least they used to!

President Bush never knew that volcanic outpouring of citizen participation in America’s World War II effort. Small wonder, then, that after 9/11 his message was what amounted to “Our wonderful armed forces will do the fighting. The rest of you go shopping.” He meant we shouldn’t let terrorism twist our lives and we should go out and buy things to help the economy. His message wasn’t flippant.

It was, however, mistaken. President Bush should have exhorted every single American young enough to hear his words and old enough to understand them to find his role in our uninvited but direly threatening war effort.

Ted Kavanau is a major American television news producer. He put CNN on the air for Ted Turner in the early 1980s. Ted is frustrated that so much citizen power is being wasted; worse than wasted – ignored! In fact, worse than ignored; never even thought of!

Kavanau has come on my radio talk show many times to talk about ways to rekindle that World War II energy. He assigned himself to investigate America’s State Guards.

Have you ever heard of the “State Guard”? I don’t mean the National Guard of any specific state. I mean the STATE Guards, under the command of the governors.

Only about half the states have a State Guard. Their numbers are few. Their profile is invisible. But they’re THERE.

The South Carolina State Guard provided security assistance at Ground Zero after 9/11. Ted wants all state guards to grow so fast they’ll have to find bigger armories or train in shifts!

The Sunday after the Madrid bombings Ted came on my radio show with his friend Harold, a Korean War vet who was captured by the Chinese and escaped. Harold, about 70 now, talked about how much his buddies in the various veterans’ organizations would love to get into some kind of help-America action. But there’s nothing to volunteer for.

Ted and Harold in that short radio interview triggered more listener phone calls than any other I’ve ever done. One caller talked about all the non-affiliated veterans who would jump to the colors if called. Others introduced us to zero-profile organizations like the Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Civil Air Patrol. Others were simply citizens of all ages who wanted to come forward, be trained, and help out.

All I recall from high school science is a drawing of an ordinary metal bar showing its molecules scrambling willy-nilly in all directions. Beside it was a drawing of a MAGNETIZED metal bar. The molecules of that one were lined up like the prize-winning drill team of a triumphant army.

Military training provides that magnetism, not among molecules in a metal bar but in a population. As the officers used to brag to us in basic training, “Discipline makes the difference between an army and a mob!”

At the moment, about the only thing a crowd of Americans hit by terror would be any good at is panic. Oh, we could panic in a way that would delight any Hollywood director who needed a good panic scene.

With training, those same Americans could be disciplined volunteers out at the disaster scene, administering first aid, clearing roadways for emergency vehicles, directing traffic, calming the walking wounded, and feeding accurate reports to police and intelligence.

I had military training in 1952, 1953 and most of 1954. That’s all. Even though that was a long time ago, I would be much more valuable in an emergency today than someone my same age who’d never had military training.

A massive volunteer army swelling the ranks of existing as well as yet-to-be-formed organizations would cost the taxpayers zero. (Except the minimal expenses of marshaling us into action, and that would presumably be done by personnel already on the government payroll.)

And what would we do, you ask? Give me a few days of your time to answer that question.

Right now a big 2 PERCENT of container cargo entering our ports is inspected. Those able and capable of such duty could get that percentage a lot closer to 100. A cadre of vigilants (NOT vigilantes!) on our train station platforms and on trains and subways could be looking for suspicious packages, even politely asking people if they’d mind holding the handles of their tote bags far enough apart to afford a peek inside.

That’s certainly no iron-clad defense against Madrid-style attacks, but at least it would let the terrorists know we have a team on the field. At the moment we have nothing. Ask AMTRAK, if you can find anybody there willing to comment.

Volunteers working in well-disciplined units could literally walk the railroad tracks, as the French army’s doing at the moment, looking for trouble: suspicious packages, track that’s been tampered with, anything that doesn’t look right.

They could guard bridges, pipelines, reservoirs, aqueducts, tunnels, trestles and soft targets of every kind.

Remember those old walkie-talkies that required a bulky 50-pound backpack and often didn’t even work? Today we have the life-saving cell phone. The ears of the professionals would never be more than a few seconds away from the eyes of the on-the-spot volunteers.

Just as they stock farm fish in a pond, we could stock every single community in America with volunteers trained and equipped to render first aid after any kind of attack. That alone would reduce the number of casualties.

When Eleanor Roosevelt told us it was “better to light a candle than curse the darkness” she was, in effect, admitting she’d never heard Ted Kavanau curse darkness.

Ted does more than light candles. He’s trying to touch enough live wires together to light up the whole American horizon. Kavanau laid out the history of State Guards in our early 20th-century wars, when over 100,000 volunteers performed vital home-front infrastructure duties. In England the Home Guard, almost identical to our State Guards, fielded almost 2 MILLION volunteers during World War II out of a population vastly smaller than America’s.

The State Guard draws no pay whatever unless activated, at which time they get paid on a par with the National Guard. New York with all its millions of people has only 1,300 in the State Guard. New Jersey only has 200. These paltry numbers are laughable considering most State Guards accept volunteers clear up to the age of 68 or 70!

If you can smell crusader sweat in these words, credit Kavanau. When he first introduced the State Guards to my listeners, I thought: “Good idea. Let’s do it.” Kavanau added the energy of indignation: “How dare the government leave us so naked!”

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson is the only member of Congress currently drilling in the National Guard. He’ll conclude 30 years of service next month. Rep. Wilson has a bill to expand the State Guard and muscularize it to fill its rightful place in homeland security.

The bill’s going nowhere. Political correctness has cast a skunk-like barrier around Wilson’s bill. Politicians fear it might give the public the impression we’re in some kind of a war, or something.

Add up the likelihood of America being hit, the blazing vulnerability of our millions of soft targets, the number of people who hunger to volunteer even in the absence of any kind of national recruitment campaign, and the pitiful handful of volunteers in training.

That portrait contradicts the whole myth of American intelligence. Instead it makes us look like a donkey too stupid to walk out of a burning barn when the door’s wide open.

And I don’t mean just the kind of donkey associated with Democrats!

Barry Farber is heard weekdays 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. on the Talk Radio Network, www.talkradionetwork.com.

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