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Fighting the terrorist within
BY CHRIS WRIGHT
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When he’s not running for president, Alexander Boros, 34, tries to make his living as a freelance reporter. "Right now, I’m working on a piece about Shakers," he says. Boros — an independent write-in candidate from Rochester, New Hampshire — hasn’t found a publisher for his article yet. In fact, he hasn’t found a forum for any of the articles he’s written, although he’s published "many letters to the editor." One of these letters, a rather cryptic commentary on the war on terror, appeared in Monday’s Boston Globe. "[T]error is a feeling of intense fear that needs to be owned by the person who feels it," the letter reads. "Other people don’t make you feel intense fear, but rather you feel intense fear when other people say or do things." Um, what? "I was an English major," Boros explains. "So I’m interested in language. The word ‘terrorism’ is a buzzword. It’s thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? I look at that word, I deconstruct it, the word ‘terrorism,’ which is ‘terror’ plus ‘ism.’ Look in the dictionary, the briefest possible definition [of terror] is ‘a feeling of intense fear,’ and so what it comes down to is feelings. If I’m afraid of somebody, does that mean this person has made me afraid, or does it mean that I happen to experience fear? The answer is, people need to take responsibility for their own feelings. Just because I’m afraid of somebody, doesn’t mean that person is someone to be afraid of." When it is pointed out that there are an awful lot of people in Spain right now — and, for that matter, the US — who might strenuously argue that those responsible for their feelings of terror are the Al Qaeda operatives who have repeatedly threatened their lives, Boros says, "Nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal can exist." This, it turns out, is the central tenet of the philosophy that underpins Boros’s presidential campaign. "It’s from A Course in Miracles," he says, "a book of psychotherapy written in the ’70s." If Boros were elected president, his method for fighting terrorism — though he refuses to use that word — would be to "turn things over to a higher power." That is, spend an awful lot of time praying. "I can spend my life trying to control people and places," he says, "running around trying to take care of external things, but I’m powerless over people, places, and things." Not exactly the attitude, perhaps, that American voters will be looking for in their next commander in chief — a fact Boros understands all too well. "There will be people," he says, "who are not going to want to vote for me."
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