The Every Other Thursday Afternoon Chowder and Marching Society meet every Friday Noon at the Ironhorse Restaurant to cuss and discuss and generally solve the troubles of the world. We count lawyers, engineers, social workers, geographers and teachers among our number. I am the oldest Old Fart in the group - too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. Our youngest member was just 7 when Saigon fell and too old to serve in Desert Storm. We are Yellow Dog Democrats and Rock Ribbed Republicans with all the shades of Red, White and Blue in between. There is little upon which we reach consensus. Nowhere are we more divided than when we parse the Second Amendment.

Ed was one of the first "advisors" to put his feet on the ground in Vietnam. Two tours "in country" and he was posted to the Pentagon sifting through and analyzing intelligence reports. Jerry was a grunt. He went to Southeast Asia a bit later than Ed and came home with stripes on his sleeve rather than bars on his shoulder. Dave teaches environmental law and policy at one of the nation's premier public policy schools. Pam is a mental health professional with the Illinois Department of Corrections. She gets to try to solve society's problems after I get through with them. I'm our county's Public Defender.

Like the rest of the country our conversations of late have almost exclusively concerned President Bush's War on Terror and its slogans. We have reached consensus on that one. We are scared. It isn't Usami Bin Laden who frightens us. It is the feeling that our government is changing in ways we couldn't imagine in our worst nightmares. Franklin Roosevelt told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. He was right and never were his words more applicable than to the first decade of the first century of the second millennium.

Since September 11, 2001 the President tells us we are at war. It is an odd kind of war. We are used to wars that have a defined enemy, a defined objective and an exit strategy. Even in Vietnam we knew who we were fighting. We knew what the objective was even if we never defined an achievable exit strategy. In this war there is no defined enemy. The enemy is "Terror". We are told that it has many names and many faces. It lurks in the shadows of more than 60 countries, according to the Bush Administration spokesman of the day.

What are the weapons of choice against the enemy. Well, we successfully bombed a Stone Age country further back into the recesses of pre-history. We claim to have decimated the Taliban and we are busy helping to build a new-old nation in Afghanistan. We are hunting down Al Queda in ones and twos, finding caches of old weapons and blowing them up. Still we are told we are in for a long war. No victory yet. For all of the ordinance expended, the troops deployed, the 2401 enemy combatants in custody, the killed and the injured and the collateral damage we are told that the enemy, Al Queda is a potent, present danger to the United States.

We have the warning of the week keeping us at Yellow Alert. The Statue of Liberty is in peril and so is the Brooklyn Bridge. Saran gas will be let loose in the New York subways. Look out for scuba divers. A disaffected member of Chicago's Latin Kings returned to America to let loose a "dirty bomb" a month ago. All of this justifies declaring a native born American citizen to be an enemy combatant not entitled to the protections of our Constitutional system. It is becoming clear that the Administration's weapon of choice in the war on terror is fear - our fear. So long as we are kept fearful we won't question the proposition that we need to organize our government to fight a war on terror without regard to such outmoded ideas as due process, freedom of worship and freedom of speech.

FDR had it right when he warned us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The Administration tells us, "Be Afraid - Be very Afraid and trust us to do the right thing!" I am afraid - afraid that I will live to see us destroy the very Constitutional protections that have sustained our freedom for 225 years.