I had an hour to spare this past Sunday while waiting for the bus from New York to Montreal. Pushing through the crowds of 42nd Street, I found my way to the metal chairs and tables in Times Square, which, for better or for worse, is America.

I sat watching the crowds. I thought about this year’s attempted car bombing of Times Square, the success of which would have marked May 1 forever in the world’s consciousness as the anniversary of an immeasurable tragedy, the failure of which preserved it as just another day.

What is it about Times Square that would make someone want to destroy it? What is it about the much smaller, more quaint Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon (in which I have also people-watched), the site of another attempted car bombing this past weekend?

As good liberals, we want to reject anything resembling the early Bush-era formulations of answers to this question, anything along the lines of “they hate us.” This would be oversimplification, racism, or, worse, neo-conservatism. We don’t really know what to do with Islamic terrorism. We pause before even calling it terrorism. And we’re very uncomfortable calling it Islamic.

Every time a new plot is thwarted and revealed, a deafening silence erupts from the left. There’s a slew of mental hurdles a good liberal must overcome before coming to a rational conclusion about what has come so close to taking place. We worry about government secrets, media secrets, chickens coming home to roost, the culture of fear, racial profiling, religious intolerance, about being swept up in self-congratulatory patriotism, wasting our precious critical resources, and being complicit.

Moreover, as a good liberal, I also dislike Times Square and all the corporate fetishization it stands for. I, too, think the world would be a better place if it were not America, and if this America were not fast becoming the world. I, too, suspect modernity of trickery and don’t wish for a second American Century like the first.

I considered all this while reading the story about the Portland plot in the New York Times. Do I consider myself, after finishing the article, privy to the whole truth? If the repeated Wikileaks disclosures have taught us anything, it’s that government secrets didn’t end with the release of the Pentagon Papers, nor with the Iran-Contra hearings, nor with illegal domestic wiretapping. Despite my liberalism and my passion for crossword puzzles, I have as healthy a skepticism of the New York Times and its partners in the “lamestream media” as any uneducated Sarah Palin fanatic. I don’t trust the Times to deliver news without spin. I don’t trust it to form my ideas about terrorism.

However, we also must not let our sheltered North Amerian lives deceive us about the way the world works. The Times reported that Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the 19-year old Somali-born American citizen accused of the attempted Portland bombing, when told there would be a lot of children in Pioneer Square for a tree-lighting ceremony, replied, “Yeah, I mean that’s what I’m looking for.” It requires serious logical contortions to bend that statement into anything other than evidence of pure hatred.

The onus is on the person trying to situate Mohamud’s comments in the context of anything to prove he or she hasn’t been terribly deceived.