An American poet takes on Eastern philosophy, Western culture, and his Muslim heritage

Much has happened in the three years since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001: what must we remember and what must we learn? This book, a tribute to the 26 Canadians who lost their lives in the twin towers that day, recounts the uniquely Canadian aspects of this world-scale story, through interviews, reflections and poems from Canadians from all walks of life. Political and business leaders, firefighters and emergency services workers, children and parents, ministers and philosophers, famous and anonymous. Read touching and heart-wrenching poems and reflections from elementary school children; remember your recollections of that day alongside John Manley, Rita MacNeil, Peter Dey and other Canadian leaders; reflect on your learnings and changes as you hear firsthand experiences of Ground Zero from journalists and disaster relief workers. These stories and reflections run the gamut of our collective journey that began on September 11th. Beginning with disbelief and overwhelming grief, moving through acts of sacrifice, courage and hospitality, our journey of healing and hope is ongoing and still palpable. Through all the sadness, fear and darkness, above all these stories are about how good prevailed on September 11th, and how good can prevail if we make the right choices today. Also visit the author's website at www.orangealert.ca.

FURY SPIRAL The prolonged conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the Protestant Nationals is escalating beyond Ireland's borders. Now America is being lured into the cross fi re through a deeply rooted conspiracy designed to force the U.S. government to take its war on terror to the Emerald Isle. Mack Bolan's mission begins with information retrieval. He must find out who is using terrorist threats to force U.S. intervention in Northern Ireland. Evidence piles high against the Protestant Orange Order, which wants the world to endorse the existence of two Irelands. But when the Executioner uncovers a plot to launch a dirty bomb on American soil, the true threat—and the real face of the deadly enemy—comes under his lethal and personal attack.

How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Did America's democratic convictions "change forever" after the terrorist attacks of September 11? In the wake of 9/11, many pundits predicted that Americans' new and profound anxiety would usher in an era of political acquiescence. Fear, it was claimed, would drive the public to rally around the president and tolerate diminished civil liberties in exchange for security. Political scientist Darren Davis challenges this conventional wisdom in Negative Liberty, revealing a surprising story of how September 11 affected Americans' views on civil liberties and security. Drawing on a unique series of original public opinion surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and over the subsequent three years, Negative Liberty documents the rapid shifts in Americans' opinions regarding the tradeoff between liberty and security, at a time when the threat of terrorism made the conflict between these values particularly stark. Theories on the psychology of threat predicted that people would cope with threats by focusing on survival and reaffirming their loyalty to their communities, and indeed, Davis found that Americans were initially supportive of government efforts to prevent terrorist attacks by rolling back certain civil liberties. Democrats and independents under a heightened sense of threat became more conservative after 9/11, and trust in government reached its highest level since the Kennedy administration. But while ideological divisions were initially muted, this silence did not represent capitulation on the part of civil libertarians. Subsequent surveys in the years after the attacks revealed that, while citizens' perceptions of threat remained acute, trust in the government declined dramatically in response to the perceived failures of the administration's foreign and domestic security policies. Indeed, those Americans who reported the greatest anxiety about terrorism were the most likely to lose confidence in the government in the years after 2001. As a result, ideological unity proved short lived, and support for civil liberties revived among the public. Negative Liberty demonstrates that, in the absence of faith in government, even extreme threats to national security are not enough to persuade Americans to concede their civil liberties permanently. The September 11 attacks created an unprecedented conflict between liberty and security, testing Americans' devotion to democratic norms. Through lucid analysis of concrete survey data, Negative Liberty sheds light on how citizens of a democracy balance these competing values in a time of crisis.