I got the feeling yesterday that America was turning a page. It was a day of remembrance, but also a day of putting it aside. Taking it out. polishing it, reflecting on it, and then putting in a display case on a shelf, along with Pearl Harbor and the Titanic. It will be remembered, but never in such a media saturated fashion as it was yesterday. This is not evil or wrong. It is just the nature of things.
I was working that day, alone in my windowless second floor office. Dean, my co-worker, told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I pictured some wayward lost pilot in a small Cessna. Then, tuned to PBS radio, I gradually figured out that it was a larger plane. When the second plane hit we knew something awful was going on. Dean kept wanting me to search the internet for live feeds, but I was concerned about what my employer's reaction would be. As the terrible news accelerated that day, the bosses seemed hardly uninterrupted in their focus on work. That was perhaps the most surreal part of the day. That as the news of the day got worse and worse, my bosses seemed hardly effected. After all, there were payroll tax deadlines to meet.
Alison's work had a TV, and she would call me with some of the news. I wouldn't see much of the TV coverage until that night. One of the feelings I remember, which I'm sure many Americans did, was the uncertainty of how far it would go. Would there be more crashed planes? A land attack of some kind? Could they want to hit railroads, bridges, subways, small towns? Paranoia was rampant.
Given all that, the reaction I had that will not be popular, even among some of my liberal friends, was fear not just of the "terrorists", but of us. How far would we go in retaliation? Would we lash out blindly, with rage not just against those who did this, but against entire groups of people because of their religion or ethnicity? Would we forfeit our own rights in order to feel more secure? Would we root out the real terrorists using targeted attacks and police methodology, or would we attack whole nations? I thought of the Nazis, who would kill a hundred villagers for every Nazi soldier killed - God, please don't let us be like that! And if we did anything like that, what would they do in retaliation, as every strike we did created more angry terrorists - the many headed Hydra - for every head we cut off, another ten take it's place. A never-ending exchange of retaliation and counter-retaliation, where the only winners are hate and violence.
Anyways, popular or not, those were some of my thoughts that day.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment