"At the very least, conservatives must stop funding the
Republican National Committee and other party groups," Viguerie wrote in a lengthy essay in The Washington Post Sunday.

He suggested conservatives "redirect their anger into building a third force," which he defined as a movement independent of any party, and laying the groundwork for the 2008 election campaign.

Traditional conservatives, who abhor big government and excessive spending, equate abortion with murder and emphasize individualism over collectivism, have always formed the so-called "base" of the Republican Party and determined its viability as a political organizations.

The integrity and loyalty of this core is considered key to the party's success in any election.

The defeat of George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, in the 1992 election is largely attributed to being abandoned by conservatives.

Viguerie's public outburst and his suggestion that conservatives should sit out the next election is seen as another ominous sign for the party less than six months before the November congressional vote.

A Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll released last week found that Republican disapproval of Bush's presidency had increased from 16 percent to 30 percent in just one month.

Viguerie acknowledged that a conservative boycott in November will likely spell defeat for the Republicans, but insisted it would be for the long-term good of the conservative movement.

"If conservatives accept the idea that we must support Republicans no matter what they do, we give up our bargaining position and any chance at getting things done," he reasoned. "Sometimes it is better to stand on principle and suffer a temporary defeat."

Conservatives have privately grumbled about some of Bush's decisions, but his immigration reform, announced in a nationally televised address last Monday, appeared to have marked the breaking point.

The plan calls for a series of measures to bolster security at the US-Mexican border, including deploying up to 6,000 National Guard troops.

But Bush also called on Americans to allow many of the estimated 11.5 million illegal immigrants to eventually become citizens, a move that most conservatives see as tantamount to a presidential pardon for lawbreakers.

Viguerie insisted that Bush only "talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative."

He lamented that the conservative movement has been rewarded by the president for its support with "an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants."

"We've been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of 'nation-building' that candidate Bush said he opposed," the conservative patriarch went on to say.

He also called congressional Republicans "unprincipled power brokers", whose agenda "comes from big business".

Often referred to as "the conservative voice of America", Viguerie gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s when he pioneered political and ideological direct mail, an innovation that helped conservatives organize and gain their voice.

He is the author of numerous books and credited with forming dozens of political organizations.

"All elements of this problem must be addressed together or none of them will be solved at all," Bush said Saturday, responding to critics that insist that border security should be considered first.

Some of Bush's most stalwart Republican supporters have broken ranks with him over an immigration reform plan he outlined last Monday.

The plan calls for a series of measures to bolster security at the US-Mexican border, including deployment up to 6,000 National Guard troops.

But Bush also called on Americans to be true to their tradition of welcoming newcomers and allow many of an estimated 11.5 illegal immigrants to eventually become citizens.

The legalization element of the plan, also embedded in compromise legislation debated in the Senate, has drawn sharp criticism from conservatives.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, said Americans "need to quit rewarding unlawful conduct."

Jim Inhofe, his colleague from Oklahoma, said the Senate bill "is nothing more than amnesty."

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation released a study warning that the plan in its current form would swell the US population by around 66 million over the next 20 years because legalized immigrants would be able to bring in their spouses, children and other close family members.

In a bid to assuage these concerns, Bush argued that approval for citizenship "will not be automatic," and illegal immigrants "will have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules and followed the law."

He added that foreign workers who had sneaked into the country illegally will have to pay "a meaningful penalty," back taxes, learn English, and hold a job for several years.

"We will work to ensure that every new citizen fully embraces our common culture," the president said.

Senators have been working to make their bill more palatable to conservatives as well.

They have approved an amendment to build about 850 miles (1,370 kilometers) of fences and vehicle barriers along the Mexican border, triggering a formal protest from Mexico City.

They have also voted to disqualify immigrants with a criminal past from citizenship, designated English as the national language and demanded that employers try to hire Americans first.

After that, a heartbroken Senator Sessions acknowledged Friday the bill will probably pass the Senate.

But its supporters face tough negotiations with members of the House of Representatives, who passed a separate bill last December without any guest worker program or legalization provisions at all.

With the November congressional election on the horizon, politicians from both parties tiptoe around the issue, mindful of the fate of their colleagues in Herndon, a largely Democratic Virginia community west of the US capital.

Last August, the local city council voted to create a labor center to accommodate illegal immigrants. Earlier this month, angry voters ousted the mayor along with five out of seven members of the governing body.

The historically liberal university has been roiled in controversy in recent weeks over the selection of McCain, a conservative Republican and likely 2008 presidential candidate, to deliver the commencement address.

Some 1,200 students and faculty signed petitions asking the university president, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, to rescind the invitation. Petitioners said McCain's support for the Iraq war and opposition to gay rights and legal abortion do not keep with the prevailing views on campus.

Kerrey, a Democrat who served in the Senate with McCain and, like McCain, is a decorated Vietnam War veteran, addressed the controversy almost immediately after the 2,700 graduates and thousands of other parents and friends filed into Madison Square Garden for the ceremony.

"Sen. McCain, you have much to teach us," Kerrey said to a smattering of boos and hisses. He urged students to exercise the open-mindedness he said was at the heart of the university's progressive history.

But Kerrey's remarks were immediately overshadowed by those of Jean Sara Rohe, one of two distinguished seniors invited by the university's deans to address the graduates.

Beginning by singing a wistful folk tune calling for world peace, Rohe announced she had thrown out her prepared remarks to address the McCain controversy directly.

"The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," Rohe proclaimed to loud cheers, with McCain sitting just a few feet away.

She added that she knew what McCain would be saying to the graduates since he had promised to deliver the same speech he gave at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last weekend and Columbia University on Tuesday.

"He will tell us we are young and too naive to have valid opinions," Rohe said. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."

Indeed, it was McCain's decision to address Liberty that set off the protests at the New School during the past several weeks.

Known for his maverick streak, McCain as a 2000 presidential candidate famously called Falwell one of the "agents of intolerance" hurting the Republican party. But recently, as McCain has begun laying the groundwork for another White House bid, he has sought to shore up his conservative credentials.

McCain later thanked Rohe for her "Cliff's notes" version of his speech, and then, as expected, delivered remarks that were nearly identical to his earlier appearances.

He reaffirmed his support for the Iraq war but urged debate and dissent. And he repeated the theme of youthful self-assuredness mocked just moments before by Rohe.

"When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed and wiser than anyone else I knew," McCain said. He added that he would have been right at home in the opinionated world of blogs.

As he spoke, several dozen students and faculty turned their backs to him and lifted signs saying "Our commencement is not your platform."

A few students yelled catcalls at McCain, saying things like "full of it," and "We're graduating, not voting."

Kerrey later retook the stage to praise McCain and Rohe's speeches as "two acts of bravery," while suggesting the hecklers weren't nearly as courageous as those who took the stage.

"Will you stand and say what you believe when you know that heckling and loudness and boos will arise?" Kerrey asked.

Glazed hams aren't the only items that America's local cops are protecting from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and antiwar protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the Web. Unlike with Washington's warrantless domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on the role of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism. A U.S.News inquiry found that federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the nation's security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of training and standards. "This is going to be the challenge," says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, "to ensure that while getting bin Laden we don't transgress over the law. We've been burned so badly in the past--we can't do that again."

Rap sheets. Chief Bratton is referring to the infamous city "Red Squads" that targeted civil rights and antiwar groups in the 1960s and 1970s (Page 48). Veteran police officers say no one in law enforcement wants a return to the bad old days of domestic spying. But civil liberties watchdogs warn that with so many cops looking for terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be inevitable. "The restrictions on police spying are being removed," says attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence files. "And I don't think you can rely on the police to regulate themselves."

Good or bad, intelligence gathering by local police departments is back. Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials, and privacy experts reveal a transformation among state and local law enforcement.

Among the changes:

Since 9/11, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state police intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more than 100 police intelligence units reaching into nearly every state.

To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to assemble lists of "potential threat elements"--individuals or groups suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state authorities have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets, ranging from genuine terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists.

Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far behind the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland security grants to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for the conduct of local intelligence operations only last year; the standards are voluntary and are being implemented slowly.

The resurgence of police intelligence operations is being accompanied by a revolution in law enforcement computing. Rap sheets, intelligence reports, and public records are rapidly being pooled into huge, networked computer databases. Much of this is a boon to crime fighting, but privacy advocates say the systems are wide open to abuse.

Behind the windfall in federal funding is broad agreement in Washington on two areas: first, that local cops are America's front line of defense against terrorism; and second, that the law enforcement and intelligence communities must do a far better job of sharing information with state and local police. As a report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police stressed: "All terrorism is local." Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested by a state trooper after a traffic stop. And last year, local police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted what the FBI says could have been America's worst incident since 9/11--planned attacks on military sites and synagogues in and around Los Angeles by homegrown jihadists.

The numbers tell the story: There are over 700,000 local, state, and tribal police officers in the United States, compared with only 12,000 FBI agents. But getting the right information to all those eyes and ears hasn't gone especially well. The government's failure at "connecting the dots," as the 9/11 commission put it, was key to the success of al Qaeda's fateful hijackings in 2001. Three of the hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, were pulled over in traffic stops before the attacks, yet local cops had no inkling they might be on terrorist watch lists. A National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan, released by the Justice Department in 2003, found no shortage of problems in sharing information among local law enforcement: a lack of trust and communication; lack of funding for a national intelligence network; lack of database connectivity; a shortage of intelligence analysts, software, and training; and a lack of standards and policies.

The flood of post-9/11 funding and attention, however, has started making a difference, officials say. Indeed, it has catalyzed reforms already underway in state and local law enforcement, giving a boost to what reformers call intelligence-led policing--a kind of 21st-century crime fighting driven by computer databases, intelligence gathering, and analysis. "This is a new paradigm, a new philosophy of policing," says the LAPD's Bratton, who previously served as chief of the New York Police Department. In that job, Bratton says, he spent 5 percent of his time on counterterrorism; today, in Los Angeles, he spends 50 percent. The key to counterterrorism work, Bratton adds, is intelligence.

The change is "huge, absolutely huge," says Michigan State University's David Carter, the author of Law Enforcement Intelligence. "Intelligence used to be a dirty word. But it's a more thoughtful process now." During the 1980s and 1990s, intelligence units were largely confined to large police departments targeting drug smugglers and organized crime, but the national plan now being pushed by Washington calls for every law enforcement agency to develop some intelligence capability. Experts estimate that well over 100 police departments, from big-city operations to small county sheriffs'offices, have now established intelligence units of one kind or another. Hundreds of local detectives are also working with federal agents on FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have nearly tripled from 34 before 9/11 to 100 today. And over 6,000 state and local cops now have federal security clearances, allowing them to see classified intelligence reports.

"The front line." Some police departments have grown as sophisticated as those of the feds. The LAPD has some 80 cops working counterterrorism, while other big units now exist in Atlanta, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Then there's the NYPD, which is in a class by itself--with a thousand officers assigned to homeland security. The Big Apple's intelligence chief is a former head of CIA covert operations; its counterterrorism chief is an ex-State Department counterterrorism coordinator. The NYPD has officers based in a half-dozen countries, and its counterterrorism agents visit some 200 businesses a week to check on suspicious activity.

Many of the nation's new intelligence units are dubbed "fusion centers." Run by state or local law enforcement, these regional hubs pool information from multiple jurisdictions. From a mere handful before 9/11, fusion centers now exist in 31 states, with a dozen more to follow. Some focus exclusively on terrorism; others track all manner of criminal activity. Federal officials hope to eventually see 70 fusion centers nationwide, providing a coast-to-coast intelligence blanket. This vision was noted by President Bush in a 2003 speech: "All across our country we'll be able to tie our terrorist information to local information banks so that the front line of defeating terror becomes activated and real, and those are the local law enforcement officials."

Intelligence centers are among the hottest trends in law enforcement. Last year, Massachusetts opened its Commonwealth Fusion Center, which boasts 18 analysts and 23 field-intelligence officers. The state of California is spending $15 million on a string of four centers this year, and north Texas and New Jersey are each setting up six. The best, officials say, are focused broadly and are improving their ability to counter sophisticated crimes that include not only terrorism but fraud, racketeering, and computer hacking. The federal Department of Homeland Security, which has bankrolled start-ups of many of the centers, has big plans for the emerging network. Jack Tomarchio, the agency's new deputy director of intelligence, told a law enforcement conference in March of plans to embed up to three DHS agents and intelligence analysts at every site. "The states want a very close synergistic relationship with the feds," he explained to U.S. News. "Nobody wants to play by the old rules. The old rules basically gave us 9/11."

"Reasonable suspicion." The problem, skeptics say, is that no one is quite sure what the new rules are. "Hardly anyone knows what a fusion center should do," says Paul Wormeli of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a Justice Department-backed training and technology center. "Some states have responded by putting 10 state troopers in a room to look at databases. That's a ridiculous approach." Another law enforcement veteran, deeply involved with the fusion centers, expressed similar frustration. "The money has been moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance, or training," says the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. There are now guidelines, he adds, "but they're not binding on anyone." In the past year, the Justice Department has issued standards for local police on fusion centers and privacy issues, but they are only advisory. Most federal funding for the centers now comes from the Department of Homeland Security, but DHS also requires no intelligence standards from its grantees.

At the state level, regulations on police spying vary widely, but a general rule of thumb comes from the Justice Department's internal guidelines that forbid intelligence gathering on individuals unless there is a "reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity. Since the reforms of the 1970s, the FBI says its agents have followed this standard; Justice Department regulations require local police who receive federal funding to do the same in maintaining any intelligence files. But there is considerable leeway at the local level, and since 2001, judges have watered down police spying limits in Chicago and New York. The federal regs, moreover, have not stopped a parade of questionable cases.

Suspicion of spying is so rife among antiwar activists, who have loudly protested White House policy on Iraq, that some begin meetings by welcoming undercover cops who might be present. "People know and believe their activities are being monitored," says Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the country's largest antiwar coalition. There is some evidence to back this up. Documents and videotapes obtained from lawsuits against the NYPD reveal that its undercover officers have joined antiwar and even bicycle-rider rallies. In at least one case, an apparent undercover officer incited a crowd by faking his arrest. In Fresno, Calif., activists learned in 2003 that their group, Peace Fresno, had been infiltrated by a local sheriff's deputy--piecing it together after the man died in a car crash and his obituary appeared in the paper.

The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a $7 million fusion center run by the state Department of Justice, also ran into trouble in 2003 when it warned of potential violence at an antiwar protest at the port of Oakland. Mike Van Winkle, then a spokesman for the center, explained his concern to the Oakland Tribune: "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act." Officials quickly distanced themselves from the statement. The center's staff had confused political protest with terrorism, announced California's attorney general, who oversees the office.

"Absurd" threats. But this expansive view of homeland security has at times also extended to union activists and even library Web surfers. In February 2006 near Washington, D.C., two Montgomery County, Md., homeland security agents walked into a suburban Bethesda library and forcefully warned patrons that viewing Internet pornography was illegal. (It is not.) A county official later called the incident "regrettable" and said those officers had been reassigned. Similarly, in 2004, two plainclothes Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies monitored a protest by striking Safeway workers in nearby San Francisco, identifying themselves to union leaders as homeland security agents.

Further blurring the lines over what constitutes "homeland security" has been a push by Washington for states to identify possible terrorists. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security began requiring states to draft strategic plans that included figures on how many "potential threat elements" existed in their backyards. The definition of suspected terrorists was fairly loose--PTEs were groups or individuals who might use force or violence "to intimidate or coerce" for a goal "possibly political or social in nature." In response, some states came up with alarming numbers. Most of the reports are not available publicly, but U.S. News obtained nine state homeland security plans and found that local officials have identified thousands of "potential" terrorists. There are striking disparities, as well. South Carolina, for example, found 68 PTEs, but neighboring North Carolina uncovered 506. Vermont and New Hampshire found none at all. Most impressive was Texas, where in 2004 investigators identified 2,052 potential threat elements. One top veteran of the FBI's counterterrorism force calls the Texas number "absurd." Included among the threats cited by the states, sources say, are biker gangs, militia groups, and "save the whales" environmentalists.

"The PTE methodology was flawed," says a federal intelligence official familiar with the process, "and it's no longer being used." Nonetheless, these "threat elements" have, in some cases, become the basis for intelligence gathering by local and state police. Concern over the process prompted the ACLU in New Jersey to sue the state, demanding that eight towns turn over documents on PTEs identified by local police.

Another source of alarm for civil liberties watchdogs is the explosion in police computing power. Spurred by a 2004 White House directive ordering better information sharing, the Justice Department has poured tens of millions of dollars into expanding and tying together law enforcement databases and networks. In many respects, the changes are long overdue, yanking police into the 21st century and letting them use the tools that bankers, private investigators, and journalists routinely employ. From TV shows like 24 and CSI, Americans are accustomed to scenes of police accessing the most arcane data with a few keyboard clicks. The reality couldn't be more different. Law enforcement was slow to get on the technology bandwagon, and its information systems have developed into a patchwork of networks and databases that cannot talk to one another--even within the same county. Rap sheets, prison records, and court files are often all on different systems. This means that days or even weeks can pass before court-issued warrants show up on police wanted lists--leaving criminals out on the streets.

States and cities began linking up their systems in the 1990s, but since 9/11 their progress has been dramatic. At least 38 states are working on some 200 projects tying together their criminal justice records. Concerned over disjointed police networks around its key bases, the Navy's Criminal Investigative Service is funding projects in Norfolk, Va., and four other port cities, creating huge "data warehouses" stocked with crime files from dozens of law enforcement agencies. The FBI is also running pilot database centers in the St. Louis and Seattle areas in which the bureau makes its case files available to police. To local cops who have long complained about the FBI's lack of sharing, the development is downright revolutionary. "It made people nervous as hell, including me," says the FBI's Thomas Bush, who oversaw the initial program and now runs the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division. "The technical aspect is easy, but you need to have the trust of the community and the security to safeguard the system."

The benefits of all this are undeniable. Armed with the latest information, police will be better able to catch crooks and spot criminal trends. But in this digital age, with so much data available about individual Americans, the lines between what is acceptable investigation and what is intrusive spying can quickly grow unclear. Consider the case of Matrix. Backed by $12 million in federal funds, at its peak in 2004 the Matrix system tapped into law enforcement agencies from a dozen states. Using "data mining" technology, its search engine ripped through billions of public records and matched them with police files, creating instant dossiers. In the days after 9/11, Matrix researchers searched out individuals with what they called "high terrorist factor" scores, providing federal and state authorities a list of 120,000 "suspects."

Law enforcement officials loved the system and made nearly 2 million queries to it. But what alarmed privacy advocates was the mixing of public data with police files, profiling techniques that smacked of fishing expeditions, and the fact that all these sensitive data were housed in a private corporation. Hounded by bad publicity and concerned that Matrix might be breaking privacy laws, states began pulling out of the system. Then, early last year, the Justice Department quietly cut off funding.

Matrix no longer exists, but similar projects are underway across the country, including one run by the California Department of Justice. Having learned from Matrix's mistakes, users are employing what tech specialists call "distributed computing." Instead of creating a single, vast database, they rapidly access information from sites in different states, often with a single query. The effect is essentially the same. "If people knew what we were looking at, they'd throw a fit," says a database trainer at one prominent police department.

Hacker's discovery. Another concern is the quality--and security--of all that information. In Minnesota, the state-run Multiple Jurisdiction Network Organization ran into controversy after linking together nearly 200 law enforcement agencies and over 8 million records. State Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, a Republican who oversees privacy issues, found much to be alarmed about when a local hacker contacted her after breaking into the system. The hacker had yanked out files on Holberg herself, showing she was classified as a "suspect" based on a neighbor's old complaint about where she parked her car. "We had a real mess in Minnesota," Holberg later wrote. "There was no effective policy for individuals to review the data in the system, let alone correct inaccuracies." In late 2003, state officials shut down the system amid concerns that it violated privacy laws in its handling of records on juvenile offenders and gun permits.

Such problems threaten to grow as law enforcement expands its reach with increased intelligence and computing power. The key to avoiding trouble, say experts, is ensuring that concerns over privacy and civil liberties are dealt with head-on. In a recent advisory aimed at police intelligence units, the Department of Justice stressed that success in safeguarding civil liberties "depends on appointing a high-level member of your agency to champion the initiative." But that message apparently hasn't gotten through, judging from the response at a conference sponsored by the Justice Department a few weeks back on information sharing. Among the crowd of some 200 local and state officials were intelligence officers, database managers, and chiefs of police. When a speaker asked who in the audience was working with privacy officials, not a single hand went up.

As Washington doles out millions of dollars for police intelligence, its reliance on voluntary guidelines may backfire, warn critics, who worry that abuses could wreck the important work that needs to be done. "We're still diddling around," says police technology expert Wormeli. "We're not setting clear policy on what we put in our databases. Should a patrol officer in Tallahassee be able to look at my credit report? Most people would say, 'Hell, no.'" Current regulations on criminal intelligence, he adds, were written before the computer age. "They were great in their day, but they need to be updated and expanded."

Civil liberties watchdogs like attorney Gutman, meanwhile, want to know how efforts to stop al Qaeda have ended up targeting animal rights advocates, labor leaders, and antiwar protesters. "You've got all this money and all this equipment--you're going to find someone to use it on," he warns. "If there aren't any external checks, there's going to be an inevitable drift toward abuses." But boosters of intelligence-led policing say that today's cops are too smart to repeat mistakes of the old Red Squads. "We're trying to develop policies to build trust and relationships, not spy," says Illinois State Police Deputy Director Kenneth Bouche. "We've learned a better way to do it." Perhaps. But for now, at least, the jury on this case is still out.

With Monica M. Ekman and Angie C. Marek

But fear stems from insecurity and from guilt. Insecurity pervades the country as job security disappears along with the unions that fought for it and families experience large swings in income as members lurch from jobs to unemployment to new jobs, often at lower wages. Workers without professional training have little but WalMart wages and conditions to look forward to. Insecurity increases as the wages of the majority have almost stagnated for several decades, and as the country goes through a wave of downward mobility for many.

As job and wage security have eroded, the social safety net has been weakened. Over the last 25 years, our cities have become full of the homeless, whom most of us try hard to not notice. Americans are aware that decent medical care depends on remaining among the fortunately employed and insured, a status that can change as easily as one can receive a layoff notice. So-called welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, was a clear statement that Americans are ultimately on their own. A little help may come the way of the unfortunate, but, should circumstances not improve, the homeless shelter and soup kitchen are the only help of last resort. That this could become the fate of many of us was made clear after Hurricane Katrina, where the government proved profoundly uninterested and unable to help hundreds of thousands of its citizens.

In the America of today, government and society increasingly disdain responsibility to help, though, if individuals feel magnanimous, they can give to the private charity of their choice. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out several years ago, the dismantling of what this country had of a welfare state has been followed by the development of massive social service delivery by the religious right for those with allegiance to their positions and organizations. Aid is not a right, but a grace to be bestowed upon those found worthy. Insecurity is thus an increasing part of daily life.

Then we have 9-11 and the "war on terror." Americans, singularly uninterested in other peoples, became aware that some of those others perceived Americans as the enemy. The country that viewed itself as the strongest and richest country on earth was the target of others whose motives we had no knowledge of and no interest in understanding. In situations like this, those others are ascribed motives. The ascribed motives are derived, not from an understanding of the other people, but from the depths within us. We give them those of our motives we are dimly aware of yet disown.

Thus, the country that spends more of its resources on war than any other is afraid of the terrifying killers in pitifully weak countries, the evil empire. The nation that possesses more nuclear weapons than all others and that rains hi-tech death from the sky upon numerous countries too weak to defend themselves (think Panama, Sudan, Serbia, Iraq for starters) is afraid of the mad terrorists out to bomb with weapons of mass destruction. And the country that flees headlong from the uncertainties of freedom worries that others "envy our freedoms" as our President once claimed, back in those days when he was the wise, all-knowing leader for so many.

Of course, fears often have a glimmer of truth to them. Thus, the country that proportionally consumes more of the world's resources than any other is concerned that others want to steal from us, to take away the resources we stole fair and square. And every once in a while our defenses weaken and we glimpse the environmental destruction that awaits us if we do not change the path we are on.

Psychoanalysts have learned that, when faced with his or her destructive potential, an individual is faced with three major coping strategies. With the paranoid strategy, that person can massively deny the destructiveness within while simultaneously projecting it onto others, as many in this country have been doing the last several years. With the depressive approach, the person can take the blame upon his or her self, engaging in depressive self-attack accompanied by hopelessness and passivity, as has been the case among so many of those unhappy with the direction they see the country taking. Finally, one can refuse to be paralyzed by fear or by despair, face up to reality, acknowledge one's one destructiveness and act to contain its effects along with the fear and destructiveness of the formerly feared and hated others. Only then can one start the difficult process of transforming that destructive energy into a constructive force that builds ties to others and together with them creates an alternative. In perilous times like these, that last possibility is the only one that can lead to a sustainable world capable of surviving and truly worth living in. It remains to be seen if we American people are willing to cast aside our fears and live in a world of reality, of uncertainty and occasional chaos, but also a world of hope.

Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web page and the Psyche, Science, and Society blog.