At first, I thought the sudden emergence of an overriding central political issue would render irrelevant all the littler things progressives obsess over, such as gender-role images in the media or PoMo deconstructions of texts.

But then it dawned on me that all these sub-issues relate, at least indirectly, to the main tasks at hand: Getting the U.S. going again, not letting Bush pull us toward an inevitably-futile armed conflict, and getting the U.S. out of the colonial-empire game that got us into this mess.

Herewith, a few speculative ways some of the heretofore largely separate progressive causes might tie into the new Cause #1 (finding a way out of this new military-political situation without losing lots of innocent lives here or elsewhere):

• Racial Justice: It’s easy to ask Americans of all ethno-types to come together as one people. It’s almost as easy to decry the jerks who make racist attacks on innocent U.S. citizens of Muslim faith and/or Arab descent. It’ll be harder to explain why we should extend the same human dignity to the residents of the nations we’re being told to hate.
• Feminism: It’s not enough this time to simply dismiss war and militarism as symptoms of “testosterone poisoning,” because those who would advocate an invasion of Afghanistan will try to justify it by citing the Afghan rulers’ miserable treatment of women. Feminists who’ve verbally blasted the Taliban regime will be asked to endorse the physical blasting of the land it rules, or come up with a good reason not to.
• Alternative Energy/Transportation: As is noted elsewhere in this issue, the U.S. government is friends or ex-freinds with many of the most corrupt dictatorships in north Africa and west Asia for the sake of oil. Those oil-biz pals Bush and Cheney could, if we let them, escalate this into a campaign to install oil-biz-friendly regimes in the region’s “rogue states,” which in the long term would only mess up things there even further.
• Globalization/Fair Trade: See the paragraph above. Also note that because the terrorists destroyed a citadel/symbol of global business, domestic critics of big corporations might get branded as sympathizers to the attackers’ cause. Such critics should be prepared to explain how they dislike the antidemocratic oligarchies of the Third World, with their extremes of wealth and poverty, and therefore want to challenge the corporate machinations making America more like those places.
• Multiculturalism, Gay Rights, Etc.: Just what “American” ideals are we supposed to be defending, if they don’t include the ideals of freedom and equality? And building more cross-cultural respect here is the best way to show how to build such respect in, and between, other lands.
• Free Speech: Dissent and authority-questioning are traditionally among the “first casualties” of any war. But war can also be a casualty of dissent. It’s at least partly due to public pressure that the Gulf War was stopped once its official objective (restoring the Kuwaiti monarchy) was reached. (Unfortunately, thanks partly to decreased domestic attention, the attack on Iraq continued via those destructive yet ineffectual sanctions.)
• War on Drugs: The clearest example to date of the type of “warfare” being hyped these days—costly, punitive, and doomed attempts to use big, centralized, hierarchical muscle against small, diffuse, autonomous targets, in an attempt to eradicate something that’s always been with us.
• Postmodernism: The attacks were nearly exact real-world counterparts to what PoMo thinkers have claimed was going on in the worlds of culture and ideas. They were an act of literal “deconstruction,” against clean modern structures and the clean modern empires contained within them, by (if the FBI’s correct) advocates of entirely different operating principles for the world.

  Thus, it takes PoMo thinking to find a response to the attacks that doesn’t end up destroying modern (western) society in the name of saving it.

• Community Movement: Peace advocates do NOT hate their country; they’re trying to improve it, and to stop it from taking a policy path that won’t solve anything. The community-building movements are examples of this that need more promoting.Also, economic bad times show a greater need for more of us to wean ourselves from dependence on big-corporate jobs, big-corporate-stock based retirement plans, etc.

So don’t for a minute buy into the notion that the conservative prowar contingent’s got some inevitable monopoly on the nation’s hearts-‘n’-minds.

The things progressives have talked about all these years are more relevant, and potentially more promotable, than ever.