In ghastly silence I contemplated their stillness. The two explosions, bloody orange roiling with smoke, that had shattered glass and steel. The inferno burning thousands of feet above ground. The wordless pleas of white handkerchiefs, desperately gesturing for an impossible rescue. The bodies of those who had chosen to jump contrasted against the blue haze of the sky, plummeting down headfirst. The Twin Towers, disintegrating as they crumbled, imploded, entombing those trapped inside.
People wandering the streets of Manhattan choked and blinded by ash, as though trekking through a sudden nuclear winter. The charred section of the Pentagon collapsed like an accordion, blackened by fire above the lawn where the dead lay covered in white sheets.
The last time anything comparable took place on American soil was Dec. 7, 1941. After that notorious attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, at no point during the ensuing world conflict or even throughout the long decades of the Cold War was the U.S. ever again subject to such violation. Until three days ago. Now, even the 2,400 casualties of the "day that will live in infamy" seem to pale in comparison to the estimated death toll, sixty years later, in Washington and New York. Most atrocious of all is that, except for the few hundred police and rescue workers who bravely lost their lives battling the carnage, the vast majority of those who died were civilians. They were ordinary citizens who never agreed to become targets for a poisonous hatred of their country.
The United States, armed with hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles, protected by the wide berth of two oceans and dominating its neighbors to its north and south, is accustomed to feeling safe. Yet, this week, within our own borders, we have seen our commerce converted into weaponry, our business palaces turned into death traps and our openness perverted to destroy. The sheer audacity of these acts demands a response and demonstrates the impossibility of the isolationist, Americentric policy that our president seemed determined to follow not so long ago.
The attack on Pearl Harbor similarly shattered American complacency towards the coming world conflict. Unfortunately, George W. Bush is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt; luckily, there seems no reason to believe we are on the brink of World War III. What the traumatizing images of the last week should provoke in us, then, is a call to action and to vigilance, a reawakening of the American political conscience, which has lain dormant and comatose. The U.S. is isolated neither on the globe nor in its grief. The buildings towering over Manhattan were international symbols, named the World Trade Center for a reason. Dozens of nationalities were represented there. The number of British citizens dead in the towers is feared to be as many as five hundred. French figures may mount to half that number. There are Germans leaving flowers outside the U.S. embassy in Berlin and Russians lining up in Moscow to give blood. The entire European Union, acting in a concert that would have been unthinkable at the time of Pearl Harbor, observed three minutes of silence at noon today for the victims across the Atlantic.
Sympathy and solidarity are coming from seemingly unlikely sources. Perhaps the most moving words for me were those of a Muslim man who had lived briefly in the U.S. and who raised his hand in the audience at my program's emergency meeting. In a voice breaking as much with emotion as with the effort to remember a language he had not studied in years, he pleaded with us not to turn what had happened into an occasion for racism against Muslims. He reminded us that the Koran condemns the killing of innocents and that those who obey its teachings can no more accept terrorism than a Christian, Jew or Hindu. On the contrary, most followers of Islam worldwide are as profoundly shocked as those of other religions, possibly even more so.
It is important to remember that the Palestinians shown waving flags and firing rifles in celebration during a video clip widely aired from Jerusalem constitute a minority among their countrymen as well. The perversity of these images, bound perhaps purposely to create anti-Palestinian sentiments in the wake of the tragedy that has occurred, stands equally as a reminder of the dehumanizing effects of propaganda and violence. When such indoctrination takes hold, when the enemy ceases to be a living being worthy of compassion and becomes an object of hatred whose destruction is greeted with obscene joy, countless lives and freedoms become forfeit. We must not allow ourselves to be drawn that way-otherwise we risk creating an evil greater than the one we fight against. However, I will not plead for the cause of idealism or pacifism. An innocent life is an innocent life, whether foreign or American, and we must take the steps that are necessary to protect the citizens and territories of the United States.
That said, a full-scale war will not provide the solution or the vengeance currently being sought. Terrorism, by the very insidiousness of its nature, is difficult to eradicate: how can we declare war on those who remain hidden, who attack in a cowardly fashion, without warning, those unprepared to fight? Yet the fortunes of war in general are often hardest on those weakest and least able to protect themselves, and America cannot declare itself guiltless of having been their executor.
The pattern of power holds true everywhere worldwide: the people suffer the brunt of war and catastrophe, while their leaders are privileged, sheltered and tucked away in concrete bunkers far from the turmoil they have caused. Soldiers are shot dead while those who play war live to "fight" another day. The tendency of those in power to hide behind their people will be strong in the rulers of Afghanistan, who are not even a legitimate government, but a fanatic minority that has seized power and violently turned back the clock in a country once on the road to democracy and modernization. Thousands of American men and women may also have to risk their lives in and around this country, a consideration that must be carefully weighed against the idea of sending ground troops into Afghanistan, on whose treacherous terrain the Soviet army fought-and lost-its equivalent of the Vietnam War.
The authority of the U.S. in world affairs is of course due to its economic power and not its political philosophy. Domestically corrupt, internationally Machievallian, our foreign policy is as pragmatic as that of any other country whose goal is long-term survival. Be that as it may, America has certain responsibilities to the heritage of freedom it has sometimes tenuously upheld. For though the America that is, is tarnished, stained, and this week, bloodied by the concessions it has made to a brutal reality, the America that should be remains as clean and luminous as ever. No further proof is needed than the weathered but familiar figure that reappeared Wednesday, as the cloud of death dissipated over New York Harbor, holding its torch aloft. The Statue of Liberty, so recently overshadowed by the towers built to honor American materialism, and perhaps American hubris, has survived them both. It remains as a symbol of the ideals that, if not always upheld, continue to resonate strongly as a part of our nation's past and present: democracy, humanitarianism, protection, tolerance. And even if it is only a dream, a mirage riding above the troubled waves, it is still a beautiful sight.