Fear factor - Terrorism's most potent weapon

A month and a half after terrorists flew commercial airliners into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Americans and our nation's many allies around the world are still trying to assess the impact such a catastrophe has on all of us.

Virtually all of us who live in this great nation have been affected in one way or another. And we continue to feel the effects of Sept. 11 in ways we don't fully understand.

Part of the effectiveness of terrorism comes from its unpredictability and from the fact that immense damage and loss of life can be caused by a small group of deranged individuals -- or even one person acting for reasons not even psychologists can comprehend.

The United States has never been immune to terrorism. Indeed, our freedoms and liberties make us easy targets. From within, we have been ravaged by the driver of a fertilizer-laden rental truck, a mail bomber and high school youths who turned their desperate outrage on fellow teen-agers.

Now that our country has been attacked by foreigners, we are finding it difficult to deal with the very real possibility that there may be more to come. In a society that turns almost every crisis into a solvable problem, one of the biggest frustrations is knowing that there is no quick fix for terrorism on the scale we have just experienced.

More than that, we are being psychologically terrorized by other fears that are both real and imagined. Out national psyche has been taken over by concerns about anthrax, a disease most of us knew little or nothing about only weeks ago.

Look at all the ways our lives have been affected because of the fear of terrorism as much as September's terrorist acts:

Those very freedoms and liberties we have taken for granted for so long are being challenged daily, from heightened security to the likely passage of new national laws giving immense new powers to law-enforcement agencies to root out terrorists.

Travelers to our own airport in Cape Girardeau are told they can't park in the terminal parking lot. On-street parking around the federal building downtown is still blocked off.

Our anxiety levels are pumped up by the mail we receive.

We are searched when visiting the Capitol in Jefferson City, Mo.

The cost of defending ourselves against an unseen and unknown enemy on our own shores is climbing into the billions of dollars. The cost of heightened state security in Missouri alone in the past six weeks has grown to nearly $1 million. All of this extraordinary government expense will eventually be a liability for taxpayers. And the cost of fending off terrorists comes as the nation's economy is slowing.

Few of us believe the cost of a secure nation is too much of a price to pay. But the terrorists, whoever they are, will win the war on our notion that liberty and justice make us invincible -- only if we let them.