The Enemy

From a just published speech that Leonard Bernstein gave in 1986. He had been on tour with the Israel Philharmonic in a year with several high-profile terrorist attacks:

It was all bells and beauty, Hatikvah in our hearts, enraptured audiences—except for one thing: security. We were, after all, the Israel Philharmonic, streaming from airport to airport, concert hall to hotel, public place to public place; we were the messengers of music (that is, beauty, therefore truth) and everywhere around us was something called terrorism. That was also a truth—not perhaps so absolute as Plato’s Aesthetic Truth, but a formidable reality nonetheless. Paris had just undergone a relentless storm of terrorist abuse, and we were en route là-bas. I need not tell you about airports—Heathrow, Leonardo da Vinci, Athens, Vienna—everybody’s favorite headlines. We were therefore heavily guarded; wherever we went there were Carabinieri, Sicherheitspolizei, La Sureté Nationale, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the charming Swiss Army. I could go nowhere without a personal bodyguard, not even for a walk down Piccadilly or the Champs Elysées. I visited the breathtaking ruins of Pompeii, after 15 or 20 years; what a joy, but again attended by a helicopter overhead, soldiers with ferocious dogs on chains, and chummy plainclothesmen in Italian silk shirts concealing stomachs of pure fatal metal. Guns. I hate guns. What a great way to see Pompeii. The next day I swam in the Bay of Sorrento, carefully cruised by two poliziotti. What fun. What was happening was that day by day, going from triumph to triumph, from one set of old friends to another, from joy to joy and sunshine to sunshine, an invisible character gradually came into being, slowly and steadily developing a special identity called The Enemy. I had never before been so aware of this metaphorical being, The Enemy; but the more protection one has, the more danger is implied; the stronger the defense, the greater must be the threat. At one point I suddenly realized that this is the way the world lives, is practiced in living—existing in terms of an enemy. It’s exactly the target that Jesus aimed at all his life, and Buddha too, and Freud; and Gandhi and Martin Luther King: trying to make this invisible creature unnecessary. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

The need to defend against real enemies must always be balanced against the danger of letting the Enemy in our heads control our lives and corrupt our souls.