Politics & Power Quote by Mark Kennedy

Vigilance is doing double duty here: it’s framed as a civic habit (keep learning, stay alert) while quietly preparing the reader to accept an open-ended state of mobilization. Kennedy’s phrasing turns “ever-present threat” into atmospheric reality, something like bad weather: you don’t debate whether it exists, you build your life around it. That move matters because it sidesteps the messy question of scale and specificity. If the threat is everywhere, the response can be anywhere, too.

The line “constantly learning how better to protect ourselves” borrows the language of self-improvement and public health, softening what is essentially an argument for expanded security posture. It suggests a kind of technocratic humility - we’re just updating our defenses - even as the next sentence hardens into a binary: “fight and win.” Winning the “war on terror” is rhetorically potent precisely because it’s strategically vague; “terror” isn’t an enemy that can surrender, but the grammar of victory primes audiences to equate patience and dissent with weakness.

The kicker is the geographic sleight of hand: “so that we do not have to fight it here in America.” It evokes preemption as common sense, casting foreign intervention and domestic surveillance as the same protective act, just relocated away from the homeland. Contextually, this sits comfortably in post-9/11 political messaging, when leaders needed to convert diffuse fear into policy permission. The subtext is a bargain: accept ongoing sacrifice, expanded authority, and perpetual readiness now, and you can purchase the promise of normal life later.