Dialogue: Why we must refuse to be afraid

By IAN TAYLOR

Two weeks ago I flew into Orlando, Florida, aboard a United Airlines flight with a seating capacity of 174. On board were 24 people. As we taxied to the terminal our hostess thanked us for flying United and then added: "Next time you fly with us please bring a friend as you can see from the empty seats around you we need all the friends we can find."

Five weeks earlier, Tuesday, September 11 to be exact, I boarded a 9.40 am United Airlines flight from Detroit to St Louis. It was full, but it never got off the ground.

Half an hour earlier I had watched, incredulously, as an aircraft ploughed into one of the Twin Towers in New York. The one that was not already on fire.

Perhaps it was the scale of the buildings; perhaps it was the fact that these giant structures, from the outside at least, gave no hint that thousands of people worked inside them. Whatever it was, the human scale of what was unfolding didn't sink in immediately. Not until the first bodies began to fall from windows 100 storeys above the streets of Manhattan.

At 9.40 am, the time our flight should have been departing, a third aircraft ploughed into the Pentagon. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now. The United States was under attack.

It would be a week before we boarded a flight again. A week spent driving back and forth across the States witnessing first hand how 19 men armed with nothing more than knives and box cutters shook the most powerful nation on Earth to its core.

Witnessing, first hand, how this unprecedented act of defiance would reverberate around the world. Discovering, after all the rhetoric, that the war on terrorism declared by President George W. Bush was not going to be a war fought solely by soldiers in some far-off land.

Within days two airlines had laid off more than 40,000 people and Boeing announced its plans to lay off more than 30,000. Planes began flying across the US again. But not a lot of people were in them. We heard of fully booked planes with 80 per cent no-shows.

Our hotel in St Louis, fully booked before September 11, had a 75 per cent vacancy a day later. It was the same story in Detroit and LA.

At the Avis terminal, where on the day of the bombings I queued for four hours to hire a car, a week later I was the only person in the shuttle bus. The driver had no doubts that there were about to be major lay-offs here as well. No one flying, no one needing cars at the airport, meant that no one needed the shuttles, or their drivers.

And, with golf tournaments being cancelled in the United States and Europe, no one had an immediate need for the services of a small New Zealand-based company either. So we returned home, one of the first New Zealand companies to be drawn into a war that had been declared, not against the United States but against a way of life, against a way of doing business. All insurances invalidated, we become an early casualty in the War on Terrorism.

Back home with our families, acknowledging gratefully that at least our loss is only financial, it seems pathetic to hear our politicians bicker over where, when and how New Zealand has declared its support or not for President Bush and his war. The truth, we have discovered, is that our politicians have little say in this war.

This is a war that has been brought to us, where we are all in the front line. We have been dragged into it regardless of the views of our elected representatives.

And you don't have to travel abroad to be made aware of this new reality.

Like the demise of those halcyon days of our youth, when our parents left cars unlocked and houses open, freedoms our generation have taken for granted have now been denied us.

The most obvious, the freedom to board an aeroplane without being subjected to searches, is just the beginning. As the world hunkers down for this new, indefinable, war we can expect increasing restrictions on our freedom to live life and do business the way we used to. It is this reality that places all of us on the front line.

In 1969 the Government of New Zealand decided I should be called up for compulsory military service. I didn't have a choice then either. My birthday had come up and, along with 500 other young Kiwis, I was sent to Waiouru Military Camp.

As inconvenient as that may have been, it pales into insignificance to the call-up our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers responded to. Plucked from jobs, farms and families, they were sent to fight wars in far-off lands knowing they may never return.

And yet, called to fight a war that is no less real than the wars our parents and their parents before them fought, we respond with calls to cancel rugby tours, companies cancel overseas travel for staff, people cancel holidays. Young men, idolised on the sports fields as our modern-day warriors, start questioning the wisdom of travelling abroad - going about the business for which they are handsomely paid.

We have been told that the War on Terrorism is a war like no other. And just six weeks into this war we are discovering just how true that is.

The first, and most tragic, casualties were the 5000 people who lost their lives in New York.

Those were followed, within days, by tens of thousands of Americans who lost their jobs. And it will not stop there. As the US economy slows we all feel the impact. Lay-offs have become commonplace around the world. There appears to be no end in sight.

Back in Florida this week I see the scars of battle everywhere.

At Disney World empty car parks and non-existent queues. Vacancy signs at hotels and cheap deals are everywhere. A major advertising campaign is about to be launched to try to revitalise a sagging tourism industry.

On television, there is non-stop coverage as the world comes to grips with the latest weapon to be deployed - germs. Not against soldiers but, just as it was in Manhattan, against people going about their ordinary course of business. The most powerful nation on Earth seems powerless to prevent these acts against its people. While the US and its allies deploy massive military might, and billions of dollars, to go after a man in a desert, terrorists reach all the way to the White House with a 40c stamp.

It is indeed a war like no other.

How do you explain to your 13-year-old son that, the day after his birthday, you are heading back to the United States - the place he so desperately wanted you to come home from when he saw the news on that morning early in September.

That place which has taught him a new word - anthrax.

It isn't easy. But I imagine it's a lot easier than the explanations that were given to children who watched their fathers, brothers or cousins marching off to the Great Wars.

The explanation, the only one I can offer him, is that there is a war being waged and, although I am not a soldier, I am someone who has built a life and a business in a society that is now under attack.

If I place any value on that society and the life it has given me then I must be prepared to fight for it. The only way I know how to do that is to continue to live my life and to do business the way I have always done it.

Every time we decide not to do something we would have done before September 11 we hand the terrorists another small victory. As we have seen over the past few weeks, each of those small victories can build to be a significant battle lost.

So that is why we went back to America last week. It is why we are going back this week. It's what we do.

The fight is now ours as well and the only way it will be won is if we refuse to be afraid.

* Ian Taylor is managing director of Dunedin-based Taylormade Productions and Animation Research. He is also a shareholder in - and consultant to - sports graphics company Virtual Spectator.