The phone rang. “What do you think we should do? Stay here or leave?” my daughter asked. She was calling from the forty-first floor of an apart- ment building four blocks from the Word Trade Center minutes after she had seen the second plane fly into its target.
A kind of deathly, phony calm descends at moments like that. Think, think, the mind says while the emotions strain to cut loose. What is known? Unknown? Turn on the TV, field a call, make a call. Now she reports the lights are flickering, now there’s talk of gas leaks, now first one, then the other tower collapses. Think, think, the mind says, repressing the terror, pretending there are reasonable categories for processing such unimaginable images. Now she decides to leave—she and her twenty-one-month-old son and a babysitter—and now they can’t leave, now they can, and now, while they travel by foot and stroller, I can only wait and ponder the possibilities.
A week later, our grandson is lighting up our apartment; his mother and father (the latter having returned, with great difficulty, from Europe) are camping out in the spare room; and friends trapped in New York or just eager to be together are swelling the crowd at many a meal. But I still feel myself carefully nursing a layer of that phony calm. Is it self-protection against all the heartbreaking stories? In truth, I want to sink into those stories, soak in the grief and the justifiable outrage. But every dip into scripted sentimentality makes me recoil. Every appearance of a Washington official puts me on guard. Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, with their command of detail, do educate the public about complexity. The president is in charge of cheerleading, which he carries out unevenly. Congress is apparently convinced that this is not the time to ask the tough questions. As on September 11, the information is incomplete, the events fast moving, the feelings always on the verge of taking control. Think, think, the mind says.
I am not a pacifist. I have no problem calling the September 11 attacks “acts of war.” But when we are said to be at war—but a new, different kind of war—I want to know what that means. Is it like the cold war? The war on drugs? The Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, Israel’s war in the Middle East, Britain’s war in Northern Ireland? How is it the same, how different? How will we know when we have won? And weren’t we already fighting a war against terrorism? What will be done differently? Why will it succeed? Who will be the victims? How will sacrifices be shared? What do we put on hold in the meantime? Of course, such questions can never be answered fully, but so far I sense that Washington is simply saying “Oh, those are good questions,” and then moving ahead without answering them, at least publicly, at all. Whoever destroyed the World Trade Center took two years or more to mount these attacks. There is surely a lesson in that.
