Knowledge is not always power

If only it was as simple as, "The more we know, the more we understand."\nOr as ironic as, "The more we know, the more we don't know." Nope. It's just, "The more we know, the more we know."\nEach new shred of information -- about the terrorists, about the war, about a newly foreign world -- either brings us two steps closer to understanding what everyone is calling the "new normalcy" or else drags us three steps away from that understanding. It's like a health official finding anthrax in another government building. He's glad to know, but don't ask him to draw any conclusions. \nIt seems that the 19 terrorists suspected of taking over the Sept. 11 airplanes did the bulk of their planning in a Las Vegas Econo-Lodge, according to The New York Times.\nThere's no accounting for taste.\nThe same article suggests that the group was loosely divided into a three-tiered hierarchy. Just like a group of middle school bullies, the boundaries were drawn between the leaders, the brains and the muscle.\nAlso like middle school, the muscle may not have known what they were getting into. The FBI speculates that the 12 henchmen were led to believe their mission was a traditional hijacking, carried out for financial gain or political bargaining. The al Qaeda terrorism handbook suggests, "operation members should not all be told about the operation until shortly before executing it, in order to avoid leaking of its news."\nIt's somehow comforting that there's really no honor among thieves. Thank goodness they weren't bound by genuine trust and brotherhood. Knowing that there was deceit and even a little bit of treachery amongst them is oddly helpful.\nBut like every other bit of news, it's a cold comfort. Tom Ridge, our new director of Homeland Security, has promised to give three press briefings a week. . . presumably so that three times a week, he can publicly change his mind about the seriousness of the anthrax threat. Of course, every dot-com news site scoffs at that kind of frequency. These days, the real news cycle lasts mere seconds. If you're a busy executive, Washingtonpost.com will even send you a daily e-mail digest of the War on Terrorism.\nIn the golf-ball hail of information, it's getting harder and harder to think straight. Every day, we learn more about bridge-bombing threats, bio-terrorism threats, "I dunno, but it could be bad, so watch out" threats. We learn about small villages in a region of the world that everyone thought was the global version of the South Dakota Badlands. And despite the promises of the information age -- that "Knowledge is power, and we've got all the knowledge" -- we learn about our own powerlessness. \nIt is not a small world, after all. \nThe carnival barkers of the Internet pledged that the distance between here and Shanghai would be made inconsequential by the bells and whistles of the new technology. Somehow, it seemed that global differences would melt into a shared affection for McDonald's chocolate shakes. If we could just develop a few more cable news channels and watch a few more documentaries about South Africa, we could really learn to manage all of that pesky diversity, multiplicity and difference. \nIt is a big, scary world. While it's worth learning more about each other, the effort to live in peace with our neighbors is not about CNN feeding us a constant stream of what happened seven seconds ago in Beirut. It's about a patient, critical consideration of ourselves and others. It's not always pretty, and not as coldly comforting as reading newsflashes about far away military semi-victories or dead terrorists who are already easy to hate. \nThe more we know, the more we have to think about.