This should be a time for a small celebration. We should hear a modest cheer or at least an audible sigh of relief.
With each symbolic act, the nuclear ice cap on the old Cold War is melting a bit more. Just last week, the two old enemies who have pointed nuclear missiles at each other for decades announced they are planning to turn these warheads away from their hostile targets.Surely those of us who spent decades watching the big hand on the Doomsday Clock should feel safer.
But we don't.
Instead we have spent this week focused on anger and fear about violent crime. With barely a pause, our attention has shifted from anxiety about living in a dangerous world to anxiety about living in a dangerous country.
As one war de-escalates, the other escalates. The nuclear nightmares fade and the random terrors of drive-by shootings, murderous kidnappings and crazed men on commuter trains come into our horrific line of vision.
On the home front we have our own MADness - the mutually assured destruction of armed teenagers.
Maybe the president said it best on one of his many trips to the bully pulpit these past days, "The American people are tired of hurting and tired of feeling insecure and tired of the violence."
I have worried that we are dealing with our current national security problem as sadly and futilely as we dealt with the old one. From the 1950s through the 1980s, we stripped our cupboards in the name of defense and stockpiled nuclear weapons. In the 1990s, we have focused on an equally expensive buildup at home.
In the past 20 years, we've quadrupled the prison population to well over a million without reducing the crime rate or, certainly, the sense of national insecurity. Yet in frustration and fear we go on stockpiling prisons.
Meanwhile, we have enough ammunition to overkill each other many times. And we have lacked the will to slow the domestic arms race.
I understand frustration and fear. Hand me the keys to the cell that holds the man alleged to have kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl from Petaluma, Calif., and I will turn the lock and throw those keys away. Point to the teen-agers who have bloodied their streets and neighbors and I would put them behind bars.
But at the end of the roundup we won't be more secure.
Now if the polls and the president are right, we are ready for something better than a buildup. We need to negotiate hard for a different sort of treaty about crimes and causes.
If we are to send more police onto the streets to be shot at, then we must also agree to take guns out of the hands of teenagers. As we fund prisons to hold armed criminals, we have to ban the sale of handguns and assault weapons they use to shoot their way in. And for every boot camp built, we have to agree to spend more energy, money and imagination on the daunting but not impossible tasks of shoring up community, family and opportunity.
We can't do one without the other.