I knew my neighbors were taking this hard when I shopped at the
local Costco. The place is so popular that it's usually difficult to find a
parking space there even in the midst of a downpour. But last week, on a
pleasant fall afternoon, Costco was sparsely populated. Making your way
across the parking lot, the hair on the back of your neck stands up. Even if
you know, as everyone does, that the chances of any particular individual
being shot by the sniper are minute, you cannot help thinking about it.
We joke about donning bulletproof vests to fill our tanks with
gas. Some crouch behind their cars while performing this duty. I pop back
into the driver's seat while the tank is filling and jump out to replace the
hose quickly when it's finished. I can't crouch. It's too humiliating to
cower visibly.
The Conference and Visitors Bureau reports that "all over the
Washington metropolitan area, traffic is down at retail sites, restaurants
and other locations." Giant Food, one of the large grocery chains in this
area, has seen a sudden jump in use of its Internet-based home delivery
service. The Guardian Angels have offered to pump gas for people in the
Alexandria area and are doing a thriving business. (They've also elicited
the kind of gratitude so characteristic of Americans. People have started
arriving with bagels, hot coffee and doughnuts for the Angels.) A gas
station in Fairfax made all the papers after it suspended a huge blue tarp
from the roof in front of the pumps.
There are, by my count, 700,000 white vans in the Northern
Virginia area -- or so it seems when you're looking for one with a roof rack
and some lettering on the side. I've seen police lights flashing and vans
being checked over half a dozen times. Nothing.
This siege has fallen hardest on the kids. All of the area
schools are in a lock-down mode. Children are forbidden to go outdoors for
recess or lunch and have been grounded from field trips. Soccer, football
and field hockey practices and games have been cancelled except in those
rare instances when someone offers a back yard big enough (and safe enough)
to accommodate the whole team. The children are scared, but also angry and
resentful.
On television, "experts" opine by the hour on the motives,
personality, style and marksmanship of the sniper. They know nothing. Why do
they expound upon their ignorance at such length? And why must they use
words like "marksman," "intelligent," "crafty" and "skillful," to describe
this serial murderer? Do they think he's not listening? The police finally
got the idea that holding daily press conferences to demonstrate their
ignorance wasn't such a great idea, either. But while one of the chief
investigators blamed the press for a screw-up involving a Tarot card, the
likelier culprit was the police themselves -- too enamored of seeing their
faces on TV and becoming instant celebrities.
It's the invasion of the placid, the ordinary and the quotidian
that's so unsettling. The sniper's victims were all engaged in the
commonplace activities of daily life: filling their gas tanks, mowing the
lawn, shopping at Home Depot, walking into school. The realm of the
perfectly safe is suddenly gone. The sniper may or may not be a member of
any terrorist organization, but he is accomplishing Al Qaeda's goals
nonetheless: He is robbing Americans -- at least those in the Washington
area -- of their security and their peace of mind.
Now that the killer is in communication with the police, it
seems probable that this ordeal will end soon. But these weeks under the gun
have provided a small taste of what life is like for Israelis and what life
could be for us if we fail to prosecute the war on terror. Everything that
we associate with calm and security -- our neighborhoods, our schools and
our shopping malls -- could become danger zones. There are many in the world
who wish it, and most are not lone nuts.
