Thinking Dark

Filed under:War on Terror — posted by 3wire on 8/25/2005 @ 6:01 pm

For at least 20 years, since my days as a beat cop, people have accused me of thinking dark. I have been called a pessimist and often heard things like, “How can you live your life always expecting something bad to happen?” I don’t bother to argue and I often just smile and reply “Sometimes paranoia is just smart thinking” One day I pointed out what I saw as an obviously dangerous way of thinking, to a friend. He thought a moment and said “You know, I’m not paranoid but it’s nice to know someone who is.”

I learned a long time ago that the world is an incredibly dangerous place. I stay optimistic but I am prepared for the worst. For instance, if someone should attack my city with a dirty bomb, or biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction, I have in my car all the stuff I need to get safely home to my children, decontaminate myself and take care of my family so we can all survive together. Is that thinking dark? Yes. Is it smart? I think so.

Peggy Noonan wrote this today in the WSJ.

PEGGY NOONAN

Think Dark

Don’t close those military bases. We may need them someday soon.

The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable.
Governments deal in data. People in government see a collection of data as something to be used, manipulated or ignored, but whatever they do with it, it’s real. It’s numbers on a page. You can point to them.

To think dark, on the other hand, takes imagination–and something more.

As adults living in the world, we know some things. As Murphy taught us, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. As the journalist Harrison Salisbury said, in summing up what he’d learned in a lifetime observing history, “Expect the unexpected.” As JFK taught us, “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word”–someone in the field who doesn’t know what’s going on and does exactly the wrong thing. As Ronald Reagan once said in conversation, man has never invented a weapon he didn’t ultimately use. And as life has taught us since 9/11, we live in a dangerous age and the dangers aren’t over, if they will ever be.

When you think dark, you’re often and inescapably thinking with your gut, a vulgar way of referring to a certainty that lives somewhere between your spirit, soul and intellect. Your gut knows things your brain can’t assert as fact because they’re not facts, not yet. It can take guts to listen to your gut.

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