September 11 Reflections: 2001 Andover magazine Supplement

Se pte mbe r 11 R ef l ecti on s

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CONTRIBUTORS a former Phillips Academy French teacher, was en route from Paris to California on Sept. 11 when his plane was diverted to Newfoundland.

Alan Albright ’59,

is an Arab Muslim student at Phillips Academy and a native of Bahrain.

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whose images appear throughout this publication, is a freelance photojournalist based in Mexico City and New York City.

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has been U.S. assistant secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to NATO and president of the World Academy of Art and Science.

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is a National Public Radio reporter who has been filing stories from Pakistan and Afghanistan since the war’s start.

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has served as chaplain of Yale University and pastor of Riverside Church in New York. He is the author of several books on public morality.

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served in the U.S. Navy from 1964 until 1990. His assignments included command of three ships and duty on the staffs of Presidents Nixon and Ford.

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is an artist whose works include paintings of President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas Foley and a statue for the National Cathedral.

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Aziz Alkhalifa ’02

Samantha Appleton ’93, Harlan Cleveland ’34 Sarah Chayes ’80

William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’42 Andrew Combe ’60 Chas Fagan ’84

Mindy Diane Feldman ’73 is an investment strategist and a contributor to the anthology 09/11 8:48 AM: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy.

Jason Fry ’87

is assistant managing editor with The Wall Street Journal Online.

is a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, where she works for the Rhodes Trust. She lives in a small English village.

Julia Gibert ’72

is a New York media consultant and former vice president of editorial information at Forbes magazine.

Ray Healey Jr. ’66

Victor W. Henningsen III ’69 Science at Phillips Academy.

is chair of the Department of History and Social

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is a media consultant who worked in public broadcasting for over 25 years at WNET in New York and WHYY TV 12 and 91FM in Philadelphia.

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works in a Boston art gallery. She lost her father, Richard Ross, and her best friend, Stacey Sanders ’94, in the Sept. 11 disaster.

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David Othmer ’59

Left: Firefighters survey the scene at Ground Zero as dawn spreads across the site.

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is a cultural critic who has written or edited over two dozen books, most recently On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place.

Lucy Lippard ’54

On the cover: Firefighters scramble in the debris of Tower 2 as they search for bodies.

The work is extremely dangerous; hidden gas lines threaten everyone’s safety, sharp debris is constantly shifting, and fires flare up as moving debris provides oxygen to hidden hotspots.

20 =

Abigail Ross ’94

Bardwell Smith ’43 College in Minnesota.

Dory Streett ’71

is the John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies, emeritus, at Carleton

is the high school counselor at the American School of Milan.

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is assistant managing editor of Newsweek and author of several books, most recently Robert Kennedy: His Life.

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is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

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Evan Thomas ’69

W. Scott Thompson ’59 Majed Tomeh ’77 Institute in Washington, D.C.

is a Boston-area technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the Islamic

directs the Global Negotiation Project of Harvard University’s Program on Negotiation. His books on negotiation include Getting to Yes, Getting Past No and The Third Side.

William Ury ’70

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What do we do when, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, we confront the thought, the idea we hate?

Free Speech in a Time of Conflict

by V i c t or W. H e n n in gs e n I I I ’ 69

I

n Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote that disagreement and argument were central pillars of a free republic.

The larger the population, the more diverse the opinions; the more diverse the opinions, the less the likelihood of a permanent majority, something which would surely lead to oppression and tyranny.

Madison laid out a central paradox of the American republic: A free society stays that way by ensuring open discussion of ideas, yet that very freedom leaves us subject to the dangers of anarchy, subversion and treachery. In guaranteeing such freedom, in other words, we risk becoming the architects of our own frustration—we create the very tools by which others may bring us down. Thus, liberty must be balanced by order.

Throughout their history, Americans have wrestled with that tension between liberty and order. And at times of national danger, the United States has restricted basic freedoms to preserve order. We know about restrictions of freedoms of speech and the press under Presidents Adams and Wilson, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the systematic silencing of criticism during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. There are plenty of examples, and there are both Republican and Democratic administrations to hold responsible. Indeed, the most extensive infringement on civil liberties in American history occurred under the direction of President Abraham Lincoln.

In most cases, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the government’s actions. And yet most historians have judged that, in each case, the government action was worse than the crisis it meant to address.

But historians have the luxury of hindsight. They know what happened, how it turned out. They can judge. We live our lives in the present. We don’t know what will happen, how it will turn out. We must guess—and the consequences of guessing incorrectly are often great. And in times of crisis, of national danger, we fear. We fear for our own survival and we fear for the survival of the republic.

It is understandable, then, that at such moments many of

us believe that liberty must give way to the need for order. In 1919, writing in Schenck v. U.S., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that when speech presented a “clear and present danger” to the safety of the nation, the government could suspend the guarantees of the first amendment. In 1951, in Dennis v. U.S., Justice William O. Douglas echoed Holmes, writing, “There comes a time when even speech loses its constitutional immunity. Speech innocuous one year may at another time fan such destructive flames that it must be halted in the interests of the safety of the Republic.”

Today, many say that this is, again, such a time. The United States has experienced an unprecedented horror. We are engaged in a struggle that will change all of our lives. The fact that much of the danger appears to come from within our own borders heightens our sense of crisis, our fear and our desire to protect ourselves and each other from a hidden enemy—an enemy that uses the advantages of an open society in attempting to destroy it.

In the immediacy of crisis—on Sept. 11—many Americans observed that the worst of times brought out the best in people. In the long run, however, the anxiety that comes with the worst of times often forces us to confront the worst in ourselves and in each other. During the last few months people have been pressured to put up flags or to take them down. On street corners, in newspapers, on the air, our fellow citizens argue vociferously that America can do no wrong—or that America can do no right. On both sides of the political spectrum people have been warned that they must watch what they say and watch what they do. Passion, outrage, anger, recrimination—these things emerge at times of crisis and fear. They do not wear specific political labels; they do not belong to particular faiths; they are not the exclusive property of one side or the other.

How do we deal with this? We have feelings about what has happened—usually passionate ones—and we disagree.

What do we do when, as Holmes put it, we confront the thought, the idea we hate?

Well, first, we might remember, as Justice Douglas wrote in the Dennis case, that in a democratic society “free speech is the rule, not the exception. [A] restraint [on such speech],

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A vigil in Union Square, where thousands of makeshift memorials have sprung up.

to be constitutional, must be based upon more than fear, on more than passionate opposition against the speech, on more than a revolted dislike for the contents.” Here Douglas was again following Justice Holmes, who wrote in Abrams v. U.S. that freedom of speech permitted free trade in ideas and that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

So freedom of speech does include freedom for the thought we hate. But such expression invites, indeed requires, discussion. These discussions are hard, but they are necessary, for they are the marketplace in which ideas, however radical or unpopular, are weighed and tested, accepted or rejected in the light of reason and intellect.

Americans have had such discussions in recent months.

They will have many more. Let me offer four guidelines for such conversations.

First, assume good faith on the part of people you debate.

They believe as strongly as you do.

Second, debate the issues, not the person. Attacking your opponent personally will not advance your argument or further anyone’s understanding of the issue; it will make you look like a jerk.

Third, assume complexity. Truly important issues are never simple. If you assume they are simple, you will never understand them.

Fourth and last, as Oliver Cromwell once urged his countrymen, think that you might be mistaken. A little humility on your part, a willingness to entertain the idea that you don’t have a lock on the truth, will go a long way to further mutual understanding.

We must recognize, as we undertake difficult conversations, that no one has a monopoly on truth or decency; that genuine progress comes from understanding; and that understanding requires compassionate listening as much as it does passionate advocacy. In the process of those often-heated interchanges, we will learn one of the fundamental truths of a free society, expressed years ago by historian A. Whitney Griswold: “The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”

Debating ideas openly and fairly will help us figure out which are the bad ones and which the better. As we do that, we should remember James Madison’s point: Diversity of opinion and robust debate are not threats to the security of the republic; they are its salvation.

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Victor W. Henningsen III ʼ69 is chair of the Department of History and Social Science.

This article is adapted from his speech to Phillips Academy students at an all-school meeting on Oct. 17, 2001.

Out of the Blue I was visualizing the mayhem inside the building where a giant, flaming jet had plowed through several floors of busy offices, tearing into the desks of unsuspecting people drinking their morning coffee.

by R ay H e a l ey J r. ’ 66

I

t was a bright, summery morning when I emerged from the subway onto Chambers Street. In a blithe mood, I was headed for jury duty, which was both my civic responsibility and a holiday from work. Late for the 8:30 a.m. reporting time, I was hustling when the guttural roar of an airplane engine boomed overhead. The plane was flying so low I ducked, as did everyone else on the street. Seconds later we heard a shattering noise, so loud I thought the plane had crashed into the building beside me. But when I reached the corner, I had a clear view of the World Trade Center, three blocks away. It was an eerie sight. On a spectacularly clear day in New York, with an azure sky, a plane had smashed head on into a skyscraper and disappeared inside. The plane’s entry had ripped a sizable gash in the North Tower. Flames were shooting out.

What was a big jet doing flying into Wall Street, and why would a major-league pilot crash into a building?

The brain is like a superfast computer, and mine, at that moment, was working on those questions. I was visualizing the mayhem and bloodshed inside the building where a giant, flaming jet had plowed through several floors of busy offices, tearing into the desks of unsuspecting people drinking their morning coffee.

Being an action junkie, I had an impulse to get closer.

But I obeyed a second, more bizarre, impulse, to rush off to jury duty; I was late, and didn’t want to be penalized. As I checked in, 10 minutes after the first crash, the TV networks were treating the incident as a freak accident involving a small plane, and the court was proceeding normally. Having forgotten my admission ticket, I was sent to the big courthouse for a replacement. Climbing the stone steps of the building (the ones featured in countless movies and TV shows), I saw the first Trade Tower engulfed in smoke. As scores of people stood in the courthouse plaza, gaping at the dismal sight, the second plane smashed into the other tower and set off a devastating fireball that exploded in the upper reaches of the building and mushroomed toward the sky. A searing image I will never forget, it was like the worst disaster movie you could imagine, but it was playing out live. In

one shattering moment, the event had morphed from smallplane accident to wartime attack.

As in wartime, there was an evacuation. The authorities instructed everyone to leave the area. Since they had also stopped the subways and buses, thousands of people shouldered their briefcases and joined a refugee exodus uptown.

Like everyone else with a cell phone, I began frantically dialing my family, but it was no go. Total network gridlock.

As I trudged north, first one tower crumbled, then the other.

I will never forget the faces of the people who were looking south as the first tower came down. Total horror. When I reached 42nd Street, I headed over to the Hudson River and stuck out my thumb. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic was racing south—fire trucks, police cars with sirens blaring, ambulances racing and wailing. But a northbound cowboy-type in a pickup pulled over and said, “Hop in. You look like you could use a ride.” He took me to our apartment on the Upper West Side, where I rendezvoused with my wife and daughters.

I didn’t lose any friends in the attack, but my 16-year-old daughter, Melina, has a dear friend who lost her dad. A guy about my age, he was a combat photographer who, over the past 25 years, had shot in pretty much every war zone on the planet: Belfast, Jerusalem, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, you name it. He was on vacation, hanging out with his wife and kids at their Greenwich Village home. But when the second plane hit, he said, “This is a war zone. I’ve got to go.” He grabbed his cameras and kissed his wife. Not much later he called her on his cell phone to say he was entering one of the towers. His last words were, “Don’t worry about me, honey, I’m with the firefighters.” Then the second tower tumbled and he died. The rescuers managed to dig out his body, so his family had something to bury. They also found his cameras and developed his final shots, haunting images of his trip into the maelstrom.

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Ray Healey Jr. runs a media and marketing firm in New York City, Healey & Associates.

A former vice president of editorial infor-mation at Forbes magazine, Healey also writes fiction.

A firefighter tends to a flag at dawn at the site of the former Tower 2.

A Change of Clothing

by A z iz A l k h a l if a ’02

O

n the day of Sept. 11, I realized my life would never be the same again. That morning, at 7:55 a.m. in Cochran Chapel, I stood before my entire school dressed in the traditional clothes of my native Bahrain and gave one of the first speeches of the school year at an all-school meeting. All the speeches given that morning followed an international theme. We spoke about international unity and how cultural differences haven’t stopped us from becoming closer as a human race. By the end of the event, everyone walked out of the chapel with a sense of pride. We were proud of the fact

that, as individual members of a greater society, each and every one of us was helping hold together this massive structure we call the human race.

Still dressed in my traditional garb, I walked across the campus with Justin, a friend I had just made at all-school meeting. Then it happened. A student ran up to us from the cafeteria and cried, “They blew up the World Trade Center!

Arab terrorists blew up the World Trade Center!” Those last few words stung me like few things have in my lifetime. I almost staggered, as if someone had just delivered a blow to my gut. So many things ran through my head: How many lives were lost? How many lives were ruined? How would people react? What would life be like for me? But perhaps the most troubling question was “Why?” Why did this hap-

For me and other Arabs across the United States, almost every aspect of daily life has changed. … My own religion, normally a source of comfort, is now a source of distress.

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pen? Why did this happen now, in a world so trusting and so close-knit?

For many people living in other countries and even in the United States, the events of Sept. 11 now linger in the background of their daily lives, a continuing, if passive, presence.

For me and other Arabs across the United States, almost every aspect of daily life has changed. When I walked back to my dorm on the morning of Sept. 11, the Bahraini traditional clothes I was wearing took on a whole new meaning, and I was almost ashamed to wear them. In Boston, four of my Arab friends sat down together in a mall and were told by a security guard that if they wanted to remain in or around the mall, they couldn’t be in such a large group. My friends knew it was a violation of their rights, but, feeling a great sense of guilt and shame, they left the mall. Things like this have happened all over the United States— some more serious, some less. Time is the ultimate healer in these situations.

To me, the worst part is that my own religion, normally a source of comfort, is now a source of distress.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “Are you a Muslim?”

I, of course, always reply with a “yes,” hoping there will be some follow-up question—something like, “So what’s Islam like?” or “What do you do in Islam?” But most of the time all I get is a blank stare, then the subject of the conversation awkwardly changes. It’s as though all they wanted to know was whether I was a Muslim, and by answering this question I confirmed their fears. If there is anything that I hope for after the events of Sept. 11, it’s that people will find out more about Islam and realize that Islam isn’t a religion of wanton zealots and fundamentalists, but one that teaches the desire for peace, harmony and spiritual satisfaction.

Aziz Alkhalifa is an Arab Muslim student at Phillips Academy. He was born and lives in Bahrain, but resides in Washington, D.C., during the summer. He plans to continue his higher education in the United States after graduating from Andover.

A City of Refugees

by M i n d y Di a n e Fe ldma n ’ 73

I

was standing on one leg, shimmying into my pants, a foot in front of the TV, when the Pentagon went up in flames.

I fell to the floor in a heap, remembering that the only other time in my life that my knees buckled was the day my mother died, over 20 years ago.

I decided to evacuate, or at least to try. After years of feeling claustrophobic and trapped in my midtown Manhattan apartment, I suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable, avoiding the south-facing windows and the wall that fronted the street.

I would seek shelter with my sister, who lived two miles to the north.

On the corner of Third Avenue, I turned to the south to look for a bus and gasped out loud, my hand over my mouth.

At the foot of the island, behind an approaching M101 bus, a massive opaque white cloud filled the horizon and obscured the skyline of downtown New York.

I rode the bus for six blocks and 45 minutes. We held the children of strangers on our laps to make room for more passengers. A woman with a Walkman relayed snippets of news

to the rear of the bus. We leaned in closer, as if trying to hear through her headphones.

It became obvious that many who were leaving their offices did not know the city was in lockdown.

“I am going to Queens,” a young, coal-skinned woman offered, “to find my kids so I can come back to find my baby in day care downtown.” We explained that there was no way out of the city save walking, and no way back into the city at all. Her eyes welled with tears. And I started to cry again.

I got off the bus when the collective tension and terror became overwhelming, and because I knew my sister would be frantic with fear if I didn’t get to her apartment within an hour or two of our last phone call.

I began to walk.

Manhattan’s avenues run north to south, and they were teeming with humanity at 10 a.m., the sidewalks more saturated than Fifth Avenue in December. It looked like a refugee crisis in business casual, occasionally in suits. Beautiful young women in Gucci and Prada clutched high-heels in their hands and walked barefoot on the cold concrete.

Handsome young men clutched useless beepers and BlackBerrys and cellular phones. And everyone headed

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A man grieves at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan after the first Sunday Mass following the tragedy.

The sounds of the city had become otherworldly, like the muffled morning after a crippling blizzard or the percussive silence under water. north—like all refugees not sure where they were going, but clear on the need to go.

In the streets, traffic was infernal, but drivers did not honk. In pairs and clusters, people insane with worry spoke in hushed, muted tones. The sounds of the city had become otherworldly, like the muffled morning after a crippling blizzard or the percussive silence under water. And in the distance were the indefatigable din of sirens and the low hum and rattle of fighter jets in the morning sky.

The pace of the crowd was quick and resolute, heads bowed for the most part, some holding hands, many crying. I tried to bob and weave to gain some ground but it was like the start of the New York Marathon: I was stuck in the pack.

When the traffic thinned near Bloomingdale’s, we started to walk in the streets, as if the city had become a giant pedestrian mall.

It took two hours to make the 40-minute trip.

I stayed with my sister until nightfall, when I was suddenly desperate to sleep in my own bed. She walked me down to the street and we covered the half-block to the corner in seconds and in silence. I decided not to take a taxi,

though there were many on the streets; I did not want to be isolated in the back seat behind a plastic partition, like a critically ill newborn in an incubator whose parents cannot hold or touch her.

New Yorkers rode the buses for free that night, the drivers waving away our Metro Cards with sad, poignant smiles.

I caught the bus on Second Avenue and rode past sidewalk cafes crowded with singles suddenly scared in the night, under an ebony sky filled with hundreds of stars and too many angels to bear.

Mindy Diane Feldman is an investment strategist specializing in emerging markets. This essay originally appeared in the anthology 09/11 8:48 AM: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy (BookSurge, September 2001) and has been adapted here with the writerʼs permission. Her most recent work, A Tomb Is No Place to Stay, is featured in Dispatches from a Wounded World (BookSurge, December 2001).

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New York was where I woke up to the world, soared with the Apollo space program, cheered for Martin Luther King and wept for his loss.

It was where I managed the complexities of being an American kid born to Arab diplomatic parents.

Honoring the Victims

by Ma j e d Tom e h ’ 77

A

ndover rescued me from the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when I was 16. Considering a return to the United States after three years in Beirut, I had applied to Phillips Academy and been accepted, but, in order to get closer to my Arab roots, I chose to remain in Lebanon instead.

On Andover’s first day of orientation, I was in Beirut helping extinguish the fire from a bomb set in a store on our street. Taking shelter in absurdity that night, amidst smoke and fear, I sang Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” I snickered about my American contemporaries, “young and sweet, only 17.”

They had no idea, no idea whatsoever.

As armed militias began to destroy this charming country, my older brother put me on the first plane I could catch out of Beirut. Amazingly, Andover was still willing to take me, thus helping shape my eternal gratitude to America.

Arriving two weeks into the first term, I soon felt compelled to spend a weekend in New York, the city of my birth, from which I had felt torn away in 1972. That year, after seven years as Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, my father had left the government and we had settled in Beirut.

New York was where I woke up to the world, soared with the Apollo space program, cheered for Martin Luther King and wept for his loss. It was where I managed the complexities of being an American kid born to Arab diplomatic parents, absorbed baseball history while rooting for the ’69 Mets, and, though born Eastern Orthodox, found a spiritual home in the Brick Presbyterian Church across the street from our Park Avenue apartment. New York was where I learned about the American Revolution from a teacher who tried to hide her dislike of the Arab in me.

I choked back the tears of epiphany when I first read Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. I was in my fifth-grade classroom at the U.N. School on First Avenue and 51st Street, exactly where the English tried Nathan Hale,

who regretted having only one life to lose for his country.

On that ground, I learned about New York’s grid system and architecture from an Irish professor of history, befriended kids from the world over and discovered that my closest friends (and girlfriends) were Jews from New York. At the U.N. School, we opened weekly assembly with the school song, singing, “… a new world at birth … together fight for victory, a free new world.” There my boyhood body, heart and soul shook with the ideals of how the world was self-evidently meant to be. There also I learned that Galileo was excommunicated for stating a simple truth that displeased the orthodoxy of his time.

New York was where I first worked after graduating from Princeton. I still feel a magical energy walking the city’s streets. I cherished that giddy early morning euphoria in 1982, watching the sunrise over the skyscrapers from McKinsey & Company’s midtown Park Avenue offices, Beethoven’s 7th and the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” alternately resonating within.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was working at home in Massachusetts, right where the American Revolution started and where Thoreau preached nonviolent civil disobedience.

As I watched the airplanes rip through the glass, concrete and steel, my heart shattered and my insides were torn to shreds.

The father of two children, I instantly felt the thousands of tragedies and terrors that had just been wrought. Once again, human beings displayed their seemingly infinite capacity to inflict cruelty, in devastating contradiction to their professed morals.

That evening, my 8-year-old daughter told me she wanted to go on a hunger strike to protect innocent children from the unleashing rage.

Listening to Barber’s Adagio, I grieved for the victims. I reminded myself that the majority of Americans have no idea, no idea whatsoever.

One Andover memory reverberated. I was submitting an

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“The firefighters—their heavy eyes, their sagging clothes, their unbridled hope—were often more overwhelming than the site itself,” Samantha Appleton ’93 observed. “The pain had lodged itself deep in the firefighters’ limbs and seemed to energize them as they entered their 12th, 24th, 36th hour of work. Firefighters look up at a damaged adjacent building where some thought they saw flickering lighters and signs of survivors. By dawn they realized the lights had been pieces of metal reflecting in the wind and worklights playing on their tired eyes.

No one knew then that the last survivor had been found hours earlier.”

overdue assignment to one of the academy’s then most revered teachers at his home. With drink in hand, chest bare and a wooden cross hanging from his neck, he opened his front door and bellowed into the spring evening air, “You f---ing Arab, kneel!”

Americans are predominantly just, generous and moral.

Yet most of us don’t have the foundation to understand why Arabs and Muslims in the majority receive our government’s policies in their region as sadistic, murderous, contemptuous and hateful.

We can’t fathom this because our dominant orthodoxy— akin to what Galileo faced—distorts Americans’ understanding and can destroy people whose viewpoints fall outside its tight and narrow bounds.

Our “free” mainstream media feed us an astoundingly consistent and inaccurate picture of Arabs and Muslims, their history and current events; reality gets turned on its head and we act blindly. Our cultural factories, led by exalted figures such as Spielberg and Disney, gratuitously and relentlessly reduce Arabs and Muslims to such tortured and grossly distorted images that any viewer, not knowing better, becomes conditioned to view them as disgusting and less than human.

I remember reading a statement by Albert Einstein after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: this event, he said, “has changed everything save our modes of thinking … .”

How do we best honor the victims?

Improve airport security? Destroy Al Qaeda? It’s obvi-

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It seemed to me pretty clear, after four journalists had been taken out and shot on the Jalalabad road, that if your hosts ask you to leave for security reasons, then you do so.

A Night in the Taliban Kitchen

by Sa ra h Ch ayes ’80

I

Paul Quinn, a firefighter with Engine 55 in the Little Italy neighborhood, affixes numbers to a replacement truck after his company lost two firetrucks and five men in the World Trade Center disaster.

ously necessary and right to address these and other symptoms.

We could also demand of ourselves to remember that the firemen who risked and gave their lives treated every life before them as equally sacred.

As the world’s superpower, we could take a longer-term view of self-interest by embedding our core values into our policies and demanding a truthful assessment of the issues in each situation. We could help those who genuinely seek freedom, or at least stop helping governments to suppress them.

We could choose, for our own sake, to break down the orthodoxy by demanding the truth and applying self-evident and proven standards of justice. And we could choose to free ourselves from the addictive rationalization that what is right is not “realistic.”

What an unbelievable honor we could bestow on the thousands of victims by achieving a moral transcendence that expands our notions of self-interest and dissolves the orthodoxy.

The alternative is more expedient, at the cost of continued fear and devastation: We’re free to choose to have no idea, no idea whatsoever.

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A graduate of Princeton, Stanford and Harvard Business School, Majed Tomeh is a Boston-area technology entrepreneur. In 1998, he co-founded the Islamic Institute in Washington, D.C., which has been at the forefront of President Bushʼs interaction with Americaʼs Muslim community.

t didn’t take much pondering to realize a piece called “My Night in the Taliban Kitchen” wouldn’t go over so great with my National Public Radio audience back home, but that was the site of an amazing and surreal experience.

It started with a mad rush of journalists at the Afghan consulate in Quetta, Pakistan, after rumors they were issuing visas. No one knew for how long or to go where.

Of course everyone dreamed of going to Kandahar, but I predicted, skeptically and correctly, that we’d go to the border town of Spin Boldak for a press conference spinning the Taliban line.

At first we were told no women would be allowed, but the saintly perseverence of the Los Angeles Timesʼ Alissa Rubin paid off, and soon I was handing in my passport and forking over $30. But not without some foreboding.

“If I were Al Qaeda,” I kept telling colleagues, “I would mass some artillery on that road and take out 100 foreign journalists.”

Inayatullah, my bear-like, protective, street-smart, funny driver, said he wasn’t going: He has a family. But he quietly started letting his beard grow as prelude to the trip.

After another flurry of confusion the next day at the Pakistani Home Secretary’s office and a third in the exit stamp office on the border, we got under way in a big convoy. Crossing into Afghanistan, we ran a gauntlet of yelling, kicking, stone-throwing people. Our back window was shattered, and I felt bad for Inayatullah, who, of course, had come.

Finally the convoy turned in at a compound where the BBC, CNN and some others had already staked out ground ... tents pitched, satellite dishes lined up parallel and pointing south. There were flies buzzing everywhere, no electricity, not really any water and no suitable place to sleep. Crowds of locals had jumped up on the compound walls and squatted there staring and mocking us as Taliban tried to protect us by

chasing them off with sticks or ropes. It was a sign, Inayatullah said, of slipping control: In the past, people would have been too scared to defy the Talibs.

What is crucial to understand is that this place had been utter mayhem in the time between the Soviet withdrawal and the rise of the Taliban. There were 30 check points between Kandahar and the border, manned by robber barons. Bus passengers were shaken down, truck drivers had to pay exorbitant tolls, people were hauled off and murdered or raped. At least part of the Taliban’s rise had to do with imposing some law and order in the name of the only ethics going around here: Islam. Unfortunately, most say, over time the Taliban turned, getting increasingly repressive, arrogant and grasping.

The Taliban press conference, which took place on the second day, was interesting, even if much of what was said was disingenuous (“Forget about Sept. 11; that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”) I was impressed by the Taliban spokesman, a poised 25-year-old who answered even provocative questions in measured tones. At one point, an official admonished me that two questions was enough. However, when I saw the guys getting five and six, I waded back in, to looks of frank, but smiling, astonishment from the Talibs, who I am sure had never seen a woman participate in a public event before.

But the stunner was this: When word got out I was fasting for Ramadan, our Taliban hosts positively fell in love with me. Najibullah, the security chief, invited me to break fast with him. A scraggly-beard young Talib in his group gave me his fountain pen. Another solemnly brought me an apple during the night as I sat under the one electric light writing my story, which I filed by the light of a kerosene lamp, huddled shivering between two tents of snoring colleagues.

The best were the two Tajik cooks who adopted me, made me sit in their warm kitchen, gave me their bed and served me endless cups of hot green tea all through the night as I worked. I snuck them apricots for the 5 a.m. meal as

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everyone filed in to take dishes of rice in a din of clanking pots and clattering plates. How incredibly surreal—an American (Jewish!) female the pampered pet of the Taliban during the death throes of their regime.

The final day was a textbook study in what’s wrong with journalists. There had been some notion the Taliban might take us to Kandahar. But by the next day, it was clear they wanted us to leave the country.

“Expelled!” said some TV folks, furious that they wouldn’t get a shot at the only story in town. And they proceeded to put the screws in the Taliban, demanding they take us to Kandahar, or at least let us stay in Spin Boldak for a couple of days. Meanwhile, I started packing.

It seemed to me pretty clear, after four journalists had been taken out and shot on the Jalalabad road, that if your hosts—who have every reason to feel hostile toward you— ask you to leave for security reasons, then you do so.

Knowing how dicey the situation was, I thought it would be insane to contemplate doing anything other than going back to Quetta. But I heard journalists offering to pay drivers anything to go to Kandahar: $1,000, $5,000, it didn’t matter.

Meanwhile, the crowd on the walls was getting hungrier-looking, and we heard rumors they had been encouraged to come and loot.

Then a tall black man—Nubian-looking, from Sudan or East Africa—appeared. The Talibs crowded around him, and a few minutes later came the order that everyone was going back to Quetta. A well connected local staff member working for the L.A. Times told me, “Don’t look at the Al Qaeda guy.” (“Where is he?! Where?”). Meanwhile, my driver, Inayatullah, learned the man had talked to Mullah Omar on the satellite phone, and that’s where the order for us to leave came from.

Hearing this, a BBC correspondent said, “Well that’s that, then,” and wisely set to breaking down camp.

But CNN went ballistic, actually calling Quetta to talk to Pakistani Taliban and religious figures there, trying to exert influence. At one point an Italian journalist came barreling out of a building, fighting with one of the Talibs. Apparently the reporter had been trying to interview unauthorized people, which was expressly forbidden, and the tough crowd that

had come in with the Nubian man was laying down the law.

I threw myself at the Italian, shouting, “Are you out of your mind? These people are our hosts. You do what they say, especially with the situation as tense as it is.”

He said the guy wasn’t a Talib, “just some driver” who was arrogantly breaking up a friendly conversation. Yeah, driver. The driver of the spokesman of Mullah Omar.

When we finally set off, after two trucks of stickwielding Talibs cleared the way, Inayatullah gently took a disk bearing a traveller’s prayer he has hanging from his rear-view mirror between thumb and first finger.

“It’s like you people cross yourself,” explained my interpreter. I didn’t need it spelled out. And we roared out of the gate, in a cacaphony of beeping horns.

Sarah Chayes has been reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan for NPR. This essay was adapted from one of her letters home.

With some colleagues, I stood on the balcony and waited— for what? Another plane? A bomb?

Taking Heart in the Capital

by E va n T h om a s ’69

O

n the morning of Sept. 11, I arrived at the Newsweek Washington Bureau, which is a half block from the White House, at about 9 a.m., just as the second hijacked airliner was plowing into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. For Newsweek, I had written about the risk of terrorism hitting the United States, but it never seemed quite real to me. Now it was obviously all too real. At about 9:30, I picked up the phone to call my wife and tell her to turn on the television. As I spoke to her, I looked out my window, which overlooks the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River. I saw with a start that smoke and flames were billowing from the Pentagon. I remember wondering, what’s next? My office has a long balcony with a spectacular view of the Capitol, the Mall and, off to our left, the Old Executive Office Building. I have always felt lucky to have this perch. Now I couldn’t help but feel a little exposed. With some colleagues, I stood on the balcony and waited—for what? Another plane? A bomb?

Inside on the TV, I could hear reports of car bombs at the state department, on the Mall, at the Capitol. We saw nothing, just a brilliant blue sky. At about 10 a.m., an F-16 fighter jet streaked low over us. The Secret Service arrived and told us to evacuate the building. We all went home—I remember how silent everyone seemed on the subway—and then came back a couple of hours later to put together a special issue on the attacks. That night, I spoke to Lyz Glick, whose husband, Jeremy, had just died in the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.

She said her husband had called her on his cell phone after the plane was hijacked. He told her he loved her and their baby girl, and that he and some other passengers were going to storm the cockpit. At the end of a long, at times frightening and disturbing day, the story of the courage of the passengers of Flight 93 gave me heart.

In Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes ’80 of NPR and Adam Brookes of the British Broadcasting Corporation compare notes as the situation in a camp set up for international media by the Taliban becomes more tense.

On the wall behind the journalists, a hostile crowd waits and watches. Later, Chayes abandoned her female attire and donned boys’ clothing to avoid attention.

An abandoned bus became a wall of graffiti at Ground Zero.

Someone wrote “Empty” on it to clarify that there weren’t survivors or bodies in it.

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Evan Thomas is assistant managing editor of Newsweek. He is the author of several books, most recently Robert Kennedy: His Life.

With Resolve and Strength

by A n d r ew C om b e ’ 60

M

onths have passed since our country was brutally attacked and some 4,000 innocent people from more than 70 nations were senselessly and callously murdered in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Indeed, the horrible shocks of Sept. 11 linger on to this day. As a veteran of 30 years of active duty in the U.S. Navy, however, I feel the nightmare began almost a year earlier when the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists in Yemen. On that day, 17 guiltless American sailors lost their lives at the hands of people just as evil, and clearly representing the same warped ethos, as those who perpetrated the September attacks. Having made two extended deployments to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf in ships similar to the Cole, I related to that catastrophe in a personal way. It was frighteningly close to home. It seems even closer today as we watch a videotape of the instigators smiling and joking about their adventures.

One must wonder why the attack on a U.S. destroyer did not serve as a clearer precursor of worse things to come than, in fact, it did. Similar observations could be made about the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Now it is easy to see that the interconnectivity of these events indicates a plan to permanently disrupt, if not eradicate, the American way of life and the freedom that underpins it. It is only now we recognize that many people on the planet despise our way of life so grievously that they will do whatever they can to undermine it.

Fortunately, their ambitions are being proven futile, although at enormous cost.

It is gratifying to observe that terrorism, abhorrent as it is and as destructive as it has been to our national illusion of immunity, has served to unite our country, and indeed the world, in a way not witnessed since World War II. The global coalition pledged to defeat terrorism is extensive, and it includes some surprising bedfellows. Domestically, bipartisanship has experienced a minor renaissance in the Congress, and support of the president is at a rarely achieved level across the land. The American people, in the main, enthusiastically endorse our government’s efforts to eradicate global terrorism and eliminate the Al Qaeda forces of darkness who are so bent on destroying us. Support of the military is stronger than it has been for years, and all military services are witnessing sorely needed spikes in recruiting, as are police and fire departments.

It is disappointing, however, to realize that a minority of people, blessedly a very small one, appears to believe terrorist attacks on America, whether they be on the USS Cole or the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, are not unwarranted. One academic publicly commented that he would vote for “anyone who crashed a plane into the Pentagon.” Some espouse the curious theory that the terrorist attacks were justifiable, or at least understandable, retribution for American “arrogance” in foreign affairs. Others postulate that sanctions against Iraq, spearheaded by American efforts, have caused the death of more than a million children. They forget Iraq’s belligerence in 1990 could easily have led to the loss of freedom in Kuwait and perhaps Saudi Arabia had not the United States and its coalition partners intervened. A few religious extremists opine that the terrorist attacks were retribution for societal practices that do not precisely fit into their matrix of values. At least one city council in our country has passed a resolution condemning world efforts to eradicate terrorism and to bring Osama bin Laden and his army of thugs to justice.

In my judgment, those who opt to differ with the position our country has taken are way off base. The good news is that in the United States they are allowed to express their opinions, no matter how outlandish or wrong they may be. In many of the nations that sponsor terrorism and harbor terrorists, they would not be so privileged. Perhaps these people should recall the inaugural address of President George W. Bush ’64, our Andover-schooled commander-in-chief. In it, he stated, “America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.”

Indeed, our country and the free world are doing exactly what the president said we would do almost a year ago.

Andrew Combe ʼ60 graduated from Yale University. During a U.S. Navy career that lasted from 1964-1990, he commanded three ships: the presidential yacht Sequoia, a guided missile frigate and an Aegis cruiser. He also served on the staffs of Presidents Nixon and Ford and attended the Spanish Naval War College and the U.S. Naval War College.

Terrorism, abhorrent as it is … has served to unite our country and indeed the world … .

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I was transfixed by the faces smiling back at me from hundreds of thousands of posted leaflets: a young man hiking, a young mother with her children, twin brothers in coats and ties . . . .

Tears in a Field of Flowers

by A big a il R oss ’94

O

ne of the greatest challenges for those surviving Sept. 11 is the highly public and yet extremely personal nature of their loss. In the days after the tragedy I vacillated between communal bereavement and solitary mourning. I tried to reconcile my grief for all of the families suffering what I was with my fear that the individual deaths of my father, Richard Ross, and my best friend and Andover classmate, Stacey Sanders, would be forgotten.

As I reflect on the weeks immediately following the 11th, my mind returns to one crystallizing moment that occurred in Union Square Park on Sept. 19. My father’s service having taken place only days before, I traveled to New York City for Stacey’s service, which was to be held the following day. Stacey’s fiancé, Bryan, was taking me to post a photo of my father next to one already up of Stacey. In the market at the entrance to the park I purchased two red zinnias. As we entered, we stopped at the first collection of photos, cards, flowers and candles. I was overwhelmed.

Right before my eyes was this rising monument to all of those lost in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania plane crash. We started to walk slowly through the park. I was transfixed by the faces smiling back at me from hundreds of thousands of posted leaflets: a young man hiking, a young mother with her children, twin brothers in coats and ties, a woman my age on the beach, a father with a little girl. Overwhelmed and afraid I would miss something, I wanted some way to document the space, to save it for later when, maybe, I could better understand its implications.

After finding a camera at the Staples on the corner, I returned to the crowds of people. Bryan led me to the plaza at the front of the park and pointed to pieces of the Trade Center that were lying there amidst a literal field of flowers. A barefoot woman in brown cords and a blue T-shirt seemingly danced among the petals, lighting and relighting the hundreds of candles left by visitors. I snapped photo after photo, totally numb to the experience and uncertain why it was so important that I be there. I longed for my mother and sister and

brother, afraid words would never do justice to this scene of unparalleled empathy and community embrace.

Finally, Bryan led me to Stacey’s photograph, which was duct taped to the mesh fencing on the east side of the park. In this place where I had spent so many mornings enjoying a paper and coffee, Bryan handed me the program and photograph from my father’s service. Quietly, I posted dad’s picture next to Stacey’s and weaved the zinnias through the fence alongside them. In that single moment, looking at their beautiful smiling faces, the magnitude of our personal loss broke down the wall of numbness that had once protected me. Our catastrophe, the sudden death of these two loving and genuine individuals erased everything else—the terrorism, the staggering number of lives lost, the national pain. My only thought was that I would never see my two best friends again. So there, on the pathway of Union Square Park, I broke down and sobbed. It was a loud and uncontrollable response. I am sure people noticed me, as I had observed others, but it didn’t matter. Stacey and Dad were gone.

Conversely, weeks later, when my mother, sister and I attended a memorial service at Ground Zero and went to collect the memorial urn, I was overcome by a sense of fraternity. In lines all around me were people suffering the same loss as I. Children clung to their newly single mothers’ hands.

Sisters held each other closely for comfort. Husbands carried photos of lost wives, and parents displayed a shocked expression worn only by those who see the life cycle fall out of its proper order. It was in that instant I realized that by these horrifying circumstances I was forever bound to the thousands of families around me. On Sept. 11, our life histories had converged and our losses united us.

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Abigail Rossʼ father, Richard Ross, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, and her best friend, Stacey Sanders ʼ94, worked in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. For more on Stacey, see page 3 of the Andover Bulletin.

That’s how it works in the United States of America: On important policy issues, the people get there first, and their “leaders” sooner or later follow.

We’ll Rise to the Occasion

by H a r l a n C l evela n d ’ 34

T

he Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were enormous as a human tragedy, historic as a turn of events. In covering the situation, most journalists have focused on what well-known leaders, around the world and especially in the United States, are saying about what will happen next.

But the main thing to watch is how the American people are likely to react—and what they will tell their leaders to do about it. That’s how it works in the United States of America: On important policy issues, the people get there first, and their “leaders” sooner or later follow.

The attacks shocked us and changed us. Nothing like this had happened since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. That attack instantly unified the American people. Since then, we have felt we had a firm grip on President Franklin Roosevelt’s first freedom, Freedom from Fear. No American less than half a century old could have imagined such a puncture in that freedom as we saw, on television in living color, that Tuesday morning.

The American people, once again instantly unified, have now made a judgment that we are at war. It’s not in us to walk around frightened about our future. So we’re going to do something. But do what? And who’s the “we” that will be doing it?

The first instinct, at least of some leaders, may be to lash out at the most obvious symbols of terrorism—in a hurry, at whatever expense to our own democracy, and on our own, as a self-isolating action. My guess is that the instinctive wisdom of the people will prevail over the itch of the instant-response hotheads—and that the case for acting internationally in an interdependent world will trump the urge to express our unilateral impatience.

Already, on the second day after the disaster, the United Nations Security Council has unanimously condemned the terrorist actions, the European Union has expressed its solidarity with its transatlantic partner, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has started the process of making operational, for the first time, the NATO treaty provision that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

Under the impressively calm and clear-headed leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the United States has started “a worldwide effort to build a coalition against all forms of terrorism.” This will be, at best, the beginning of a long-term coalition-of-the-willing that won’t be satisfied to decapitate a few obvious villains, but will write and enforce new rules for peaceful change and civilized behavior in the 21st century.

Like most things worth doing, this won’t be done in a hurry. It won’t be done without casualties. It won’t be done at bargain prices. For a start, it will doubtless cost a lot more than we were planning to spend on “defense.” This may require changing some suddenly premature Republican ideas about tax cutting and postponing some Democratic ambitions about social spending.

The American people are heir to one tradition that is a feature of our history but is, curiously, not yet expressed in the lyrics of our patriotic songs. Ours is a nation that rises to the occasion. We have done it before, and we will do it again.

An old Irish saying asks, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get in?” The lesson of Sept. 11 is that, in this increasingly interdependent world, there are no private fights. Each affects us all.

—William L. Ury ’70, page 34

Harlan Cleveland has been U.S. assistant secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to NATO, president of the University of Hawaii and president of the World Academy of Art and Science. This essay was written on the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was published in The WorldPaper. It is adapted here with the authorʼs permission.

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My experience in Canada gives me heart: Ordinary people, when called upon, tend to show their best. They open up their houses, feed you, treat you well.

An Unscheduled Stop

by Ala n Albr i g h t ’ 59

O

n the morning of Sept. 11, I was returning to California after spending the summer in France visiting my American Field Service host of 43 years earlier. I’d been napping, but woke up when I heard an anxious voice say, “Something’s going on!” The flight attendants were bustling about the cabin.

“This is your captain,” another voice said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” We all thought we knew what that meant, but our leader was merely announcing that we had been ordered from the sky. We were 35 minutes from Gander, Newfoundland, so down we went, along with 37 other flights bound for the United States. It was then our apprenticeship began: 13 hours parked on the tarmac, napping, running out of food, getting to know each other—and happily so, because we had not perished.

Finally Newfoundland welcomed us with open arms.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police smiled at us, the Customs people were kind, the Salvation Army took our names and fed us, and TWA Flight 819, as we had quickly come to be known, was shepherded to a herd of yellow school buses that ferried us down the main street of Gander to the Masonic Temple.

One by one, other flights followed suit, ending up in the bowling alley, in schoolrooms, in churches … 6,500 visitors in a town whose residents numbered 10,000. The town council had met while we were cooling our heels, and we were greeted with marvelous organization.

We found a TV and saw the first images of the unthinkable. Then, like the grimace of Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby shot him, those images were slapped against our psyches again and again until we could feel no more.

“How long before they make the people cry?” I thought.

You know, the interviews of the families of the missing ... .

But in sharp contrast to the media soul-vampires, our hosts couldn’t do enough to raise our spirits. “Anyone who would

like to take a shower ... ” someone said cheerily, and most of us went. I was ferried by a friendly Mason to his home, handed a towel and given the luxury of warm water and cleanliness.

A little sign in the A&W root beer shop read, “See the cashier if you need to e-mail someone.” At the library, some 30 Internet-access computers were set up. Nearby, a table was filled with snacks. Throughout our three-day stay, our hosts cooked up a storm. No one ever mentioned money.

Shall I tell you how we got to know each other? No. You can guess. Time had stopped and we were at the table together.

Shall I describe the Upstairs Snororama? Eighty bodies on the floor, then on cots. Impossible.

“I woke up,” a retired TWA pilot from Springfield, Mo., told me, “and found I was almost in the intimate embrace of my neighbor. I slowly pulled away, turned over, got up—and walked away with my eyes closed, so I wouldn’t know who it was.”

Finally, on Sept. 14, we all clapped as Flight 6909—our new name—took off. We applauded again as we entered U.S. air space and a third time when we set down in St. Louis. We took pictures of each other, wrote down names and recorded e-mail addresses. On the way out the door, we hugged or embraced the flight attendants, shook mightily the hand of our captain, and woke up to our brave new world.

More than a month has gone by as I write this, and, no exception to the rule, I’m grieving. That was you and I—or family and friends—up there in those towers, following the everyday routine, going to work. And that certainly could have been me on the wrong plane! That’s the nitty-gritty and we’re all hard hit.

On the other hand, there is the inspiring example of the passengers on the fourth plane. We 60-year-olds of the Class of ’59 are, in a way, on a fourth plane, as we realize that we’re well past the halfway mark, our time is running out and, sooner or later, we’re going to crash, as our parents have done or are doing. Let the young ones dream their American Dreams, but what about us?

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A hazardous materials firetruck heads north out of Ground Zero with a weary firefighter after a shift.

Workers were not supposed to work more than 12 hours at a time, but most stayed longer.

On Sept. 11, the people in the fourth plane made the most of their remaining time—for the benefit of others, not themselves. Sounds pretty hokey, but it doesn’t have to.

The bottom line is that, in my “speck of cosmic dust” analogy, the only plane whose direction I can change is my own. Yes, it would be easier to simply stick with a game paradigm, saying, “Rah! Rah! We’re the best. The others are rats. Kill ’em!” But, you see, my experience in Canada gives me heart: Ordinary people, when called upon, tend to show their best. They open up their houses, feed you, treat you well in the best tradition of hospitality.

I personally don’t need images, real or imagined, of airplanes crashing into skyscrapers to put this lesson to work.

Terrorism is all around me—beginning with an Empire of Evil no one seems to know how to combat: drugs, of course, and alcoholism, psychological disturbance and emotional distress. These, we are all sad to realize, have taken their toll even of our own classmates.

And it is here that all of us, in a kind of Settlement House approach, can share the fruit of our life’s experience with our neighbors—and vice versa—perhaps to influence things in some positive way.

Alan Albright has taught French at Andover and English in Chinatown, done child welfare work in Spanish Harlem, served as a medic in the Army and crafted bamboo flutes and wooden orcarinas. More recently, he spent 10 years teaching, trans-lating and doing volunteer work in France. Currently, he is waltzing “Matilda,” a recreational vehicle, down American highways while contributing to a Web site called the Great War Primary Document Archive.

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Working where I do, the Twin Towers are my anchor. When I direct people to our office, I have them get themselves to the Trade Center—the rest is easy.

Losing an Anchor

by Ja son F r y ’8 7

T

here’s a sound you hear a fair amount in Brooklyn Heights—the sound a truck, going a bit too fast, makes when it hits one of the ubiquitous iron slabs laid over streets undergoing repair. A loud, hollow two-tone sound. Thudthump.

That’s what I knew had awakened me—but it only did so for a moment. Looking back, there were things that didn’t fit: The truck-on-a-slab noise wasn’t repeated, as it should have been, and people outside somewhere were yelling. But random yelling isn’t exactly unprecedented in New York City, either. I had perhaps half an hour longer to sleep before I had to go to work. I got back to it.

Sometime later the noise woke me up again. People were yelling again, louder this time, and they weren’t stopping. I sat up, blinking. The radio came on. The jocks were yelling something about the Air Force. They were outraged, and this morning it didn’t sound manufactured.

The next couple of minutes are confusing. My wife called. I tried to turn on the TV and fumbled with the remote.

I don’t remember if she told me first or if I saw it on TV. But there it was, impossibly—the Twin Towers, 110 stories each, black smoke pouring from gaping holes in the structures.

People were telling me why. They’d been hit by airplanes.

Planes flown by suicide bombers. Not just planes—not Cessnas or Piper Cubs, the kind of things that hit buildings.

They’d been hit by jumbo jets.

I walk to work every morning. I walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, past City Hall, past St. Paul’s Chapel along Vesey Street, down Church Street, past the Borders and the misspelled Millenium Hotel, then across the street and across the Trade Center Plaza. The plaza is always bustling with people: groups with cameras, couples taking turns posing with one tower or another behind them. The couples like to stand on the benches or the bases of the sculptures, directing each other to take the picture at a slight upward angle while they sweep out an arm to try to enfold one of the Twin Towers in their reach. To leave the plaza, I walk down a narrow stairway that hugs the South Tower—2 WTC. I always make a

point of leaning back and craning my neck up the silver steel ribs of the building, watching the parallel lines seem to converge far above my head. Sometimes I’ve rapped a beam or patted it as I go by. Every morning, through the windows, inside 2 WTC, I can see the tourists in their shorts, windbreakers tied around their waists, waiting for admission to the observation deck. I cross Liberty Street and walk over a pedestrian bridge to the World Financial Center, across the West Side Highway, perhaps 200 yards from the World Trade Center. That’s where I work. Each evening I reverse the process.

Working where I do, the Twin Towers are my anchor.

When I direct people to our office, I have them get themselves to the Trade Center—the rest is easy. When I come out of the subway in some part of the city I don’t know, I figure out where I am and which direction I should turn by finding the Twin Towers.

Still sleepy and a bit stunned, I called one of my friends at work, one whose number I always forget. I dialed it blind, trusting my fingers. Incredibly, I got the number right. More incredibly, he picked up at once.

Any halfway-decent screenwriter would rewrite our dialogue. I wish I could.

“Hey dude,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, you know, international terrorism,” he said.

I laughed. He snorted. It was ridiculous, but it had told me what I needed to know: My friends and colleagues, who had to be able to stare up at those vast, smoking mouths in the steel practically over their heads, were OK. “We’re evacuating,” he said. “They want us to go to the Hudson.”

When we hung up, I knew I wasn’t going to work. But what was I going to do instead? I walked to my back door, opened it and peered through the gate. From that angle, all I could see was an infinite blue sky. It’s a beautiful day, I thought, already knowing it wasn’t, that in any way that mattered it was far from it. But it was a beautiful day. The sky didn’t care.

A friend who works with me and who also lives in Brooklyn came by, also at a loss. On TV we saw the first tower vanish, dropping down on itself in a manner so orderly that it

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looked like a man-made demolition, which it was. We waited until the pillar of smoke twisted aside to reveal the surreal sight of the one remaining Twin Tower. Then we watched— now not surprised at all—as the last tower fell in on itself and was no more. We ate PowerBars. We drank Coke. My friend got up to pee at least 10 times. I couldn’t get warm, even though it was an Indian-summer day.

The Pentagon was hit. From our perspective, that was either the end of the world, in which case none of our musings would matter, or just a subplot to the real drama—what journalists call a sidebar. That in itself was obviously and self-evidently impossible: How could suicide bombers ramming a jumbo jet into the Pentagon possibly be the sidebar for anything? And yet it was. Tom Clancy came on, and that was utterly appropriate, for who’d ever heard of such a thing outside of the fat thrillers people read on an

airplane? This was the kind of thing that only screenwriters and novelists could pull off. And then only in their imaginations. It was a diabolical scheme, I kept thinking, annoyed with myself that I couldn’t think of anything better.

In the backyard bits of white—pulverized cement, I found out later—were drifting down out of the sky. It looked like the first snow in November.

Jason Fry ʼ87 is an assistant managing editor with The Wall Street Journal Online. He and his colleagues are now based in South Brunswick, N.J., while the Online Journalʼs offices in New York City are repaired. Fry lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife, Emily M. Bernstein ʼ86.

Privilege, Love and Liberty

by Sa m a n t h a A p p l et on ’93

T

he personal change we experience amid tragedy has little to do with change itself. We are merely realigning ourselves on a track laid down over years. I could compile a hefty list of the things I’ve learned since Sept. 11. But they are circumstantial nuggets of information. And the guilt of my previous ignorance is often stronger than the satisfaction of new knowledge.

But how to quantify the truly substantive learning? I knew being a parent was an overwhelming, highly charged assignment in life. I knew the bite of loneliness when a loved one died. And I knew America wasn’t immune to the suffering that parts of the world endure daily.

But over the past few months I have added greater depth and definition to these understandings. Fleshed them out limb by emotional limb. The Ah! The Oh. I knew that, I should have known that, and how could I have forgotten that?

One of the best places to witness these reawakenings is The

New York Times section “Portraits of Grief,” in which family and friends eulogize those lost on Sept. 11.

There is a painful finality to these quotes. Even at Ground Zero on the night of Sept. 12, we had a certain innocence. My heart cracks a little each time I think of our futile hope as we toiled, bucket after bucket. Of course we couldn’t have known that the last survivor had been found earlier that afternoon. But we didn’t question our hope or unity as wounded Americans, despite the different directions we walked in as we exited Ground Zero the next morning.

Our convictions in life may never change much, but they are certainly reinforced in life’s painful punctuations. One of the side effects of the tragedy is the combative nature discussions have assumed as our principles take shape. Until September, I never understood the McCarthy era. I do now.

Most people have a solid sense of right and wrong, and a tragedy of this magnitude amplifies these convictions.

Deadlocked disagreements concerning U.S. foreign policy (and recent domestic anti-terrorist policies) don’t end with a friendly laugh and a slap on the back anymore. Political

I have never been more proud of our civil liberties. But I’ve discovered this pride at a great cost: I’m seeing our liberties anew because they run the risk of being dragged away in front of my eyes.

—23—

In the midst of uncertainty, we experience contrasting feelings. While we celebrate what it means to be an American, we recognize that global unrest calls for more imagination, competence and persistence than we and others normally employ.

Toward a More Perfect Union

by B a rd wel l Sm it h ’43

T

Thousands gather in Union Square to pay respects. In her essay on page 17, a bereaved Abigail Ross ’94 called the park “a scene of unparalleled empathy and community embrace.”

correctness, for all its good and bad, has taken a back seat to deep-seated fear and, consequently, racism. Stumbling through our differences is nothing new, but the differences have become more visible as we debate the consequences of our personal and global decisions.

I have never been more proud of our civil liberties. But I’ve discovered this pride at a great cost: I’m seeing our liberties anew because they run the risk of being dragged away in front of my eyes. The greatest lesson in all of this is awareness (not to be confused with fear). Awareness of the world beyond our gates and awareness of what we value at sunset. But, most important, awareness of the complacency that can accompany privilege. Privilege in all its forms— from the privilege of being loved to the privilege of questioning authority.

We are all heading on different compass bearings as we deal with this tragedy. But we can harness the adrenaline rush and be thankful for the purpose it seems to have given most of us. It took a mighty bang to straighten our backs and get New Yorkers to hand out free coffee and socks. It also gave a father the unfortunate luck of publishing words of love for his daughter in The New York Times for all the world to see.

—24—

Samantha Appleton was raised in Camden, Maine. She is a freelance photojournalist based in Mexico City and New York City.

Last September, she spent several days photographing the disaster in Lower Manhattan.

Her images appear throughout these pages.

he terrorist events of Sept. 11 were shocks to the world as we knew it. Beyond mourning the deaths of those who died by terrorist means, people around the world are seeking to discover a new world view together with more equitable forms of coexisting. Terrorism, after all, is not a modern phenomenon, though modern technology makes it more explosive, more available. As Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan has reminded us, our own history reveals the face and consequences of terrorism: Blacks in America are no strangers to terrorism, as evidenced in slavery, lynching and Jim Crowism.

Comparable histories exist around the globe.

Since Sept. 11, Americans have experienced new depths of feeling for our country. The recent attacks highlight the ways in which our destiny and those of other peoples are inextricably bound. In the midst of uncertainty about what this event signifies, we experience contrasting feelings.

While we celebrate the strength of what it means to be an American, we recognize that global unrest calls for more imagination, more competence and more persistence than we and others normally employ. Some among us bristle at any criticism of our society. As Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote 50 years ago, such a view sees American policies as “so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions.” The arrogance of such a stance is matched by its ignorance of America’s basic values and by the evolution of these values over time.

Noted clergyman William Sloane Coffin ’42 rightly argues that genuine citizenship requires a lover’s quarrel with society’s policies. True loyalty employs higher expectations for ourselves as a nation. In Niebuhr’s words, “Loyalty to the community is … morally tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the community.” The patriotism of “my country right or wrong” does a fundamental disservice to the concept of discerning citizenship and to the Constitution of this country, which obligates its people to practice the painful but liberating task of self-appraisal.

Welcoming other peoples of the world to its shores is an American trademark, unequalled elsewhere. This repeated

influx decade after decade, by which people seek “a new kind of justice [and] a better kind of life,” as Woodrow Wilson observed in 1915, reaffirms America’s belief that the abuses of political, social and economic power may be redressed.

This potential for continuing reassessment nourishes one’s deepest appreciation for being an American.

Recognizing the imperfection of this process, Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address challenged the nation to move toward a more perfect union, one by which there could evolve a government truly of the people, by the people and for the people—an ideal he knew would always be threatened by narrow self-interest and the claims of self-righteousness.

In her hymn “America, the Beautiful,” which really should be our national anthem, Katherine Lee Bates asks, “God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

The wisdom of that supplication stems from the essence of America’s proper vision of itself, which includes a self-correcting mechanism at the heart of the nation’s self-awareness. It is this vision, rather than our power or our virtue, that makes the American experiment pertinent to other people. Without this vision, societies resort to tribal and ethnic retaliation. Ali Salem, an Egyptian writer, speaks of “ancient views clouded by hatred from other stages of history.” Straying from this vision we live a contradiction.

The tragic events of Sept. 11 beckon all peoples to recognize their shared destiny, beyond the polarities that keep dividing us. In summer 1969, when the world was first viewed from the moon, all earthbound differences were invisible. From this perspective, as the poet Joy Harjo notes, the image was no longer humancentric. Upon returning to earth, however, old world views resumed their claims. With the rude awakening of Sept. 11, people across the globe were profoundly moved by the connections that transcend these differences. Isolation from each other was suddenly anachronistic. One asks, in all honesty, what are the implications of this reality?

—25—

Bardwell Smith is the John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies, emeritus, at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Osama bin Laden not only didn’t deal us a fatal blow; he wakened us from a deadly lethargy.

Thank you, Osama

by W. S c ot t T h omps o n ’ 59

I

f there were any doubt that the first century of the new millennium would be yet another American era, Osama bin Laden has removed it once and for all. Before Sept. 11 America was on a long-term collision course with China that we could win only expensively. And it was to be a lose-lose proposition, period. Toward Russia we had contempt at best, and it was only a matter of time before the tough-minded Putin put together a de facto alliance of all those against “unilateralism,” the nice code word for the new American imperialism.

Ourselves, well, we did everything right. Even though the dot-com meltdown evaporated some of the excess confidence, we were still the country of exceptionalism. The Dow wasn’t off very much, after all, and the blip of a possible recession was forecast to be short and healthy. We didn’t need to worry about the fact that in simple mathematical terms about two-thirds of the world was getting poorer relative to us and the rest of the rich world. The pressure of poor job seekers—workers from Indonesia sneaking into Singapore, Algerians going into France, Tunisians entering Italy and Hispanics crossing the Rio Grande into the United States—was taken to be just labor economics. We needed labor. Like Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was.

We could afford a foreign policy driven by our vanity, rather than the real forces outside, not only because we were so powerful, but because everyone wanted to have a special relationship with us. And not just the Brits: China held our biggest deficit and wanted respectability; Mexico wanted a new first-world standing; France as the only other true world power with a global perspective; Turkey as our only secular Muslim friend, and so forth. They all wanted to be close.

We could continue as we had for a generation with a Middle East policy almost solely driven by domestic politics rather than the realities abroad, with which foreign policies have traditionally been concerned. The king at the center doesn’t move; the knights move around him. He eats what pleases him.

Some of us wondered how long this ecstasy could last.

Maybe through the decade, with an enormous amount of luck. But by the end of the decade, China with its 8-12 percent growth rates would have become a military power of the

first rank. And countries lying in a broad band starting south of Japan, curving all the way around Asia and encompassing all of Africa, were becoming enraged places where half the population was under 25 and most of those unemployed. We could ignore all of this because the crumbs from the table were enough. After all, for every potential agitator, there was another computer geek hoping to plug into the I.T. revolution. The “love bug” virus inventor of the Philippines might otherwise have joined the bin Laden affiliate, the Abu Sayef, in his country’s south.

It was not clear to some of us that we could make it through the decade without a reaction that, somehow, hurt— and hurt big.

But there was always the seductive tune of exceptionalism. We had always been the different case because of our different and lucky history. We were generous, so why need we worry about a billion Muslims, who had their differences one with another (“What the Arabs know how to do is fight with each other,” a high Washington official once told me) and had in common only a fiery hatred of our policy toward the central fulcrum in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict? From Lagos to Jakarta, from Dakar to Aceh, with Teheran, Karachi and Baghdad in between, there was a seething and common hatred for that policy. But every politician in America could assure you the policy would not change— after all, the countervailing tendencies that he cared about were in ethnic American politics, not in the Gaza Strip.

Authoritarian leaders in that region, afraid of their own people, would ally with us to shore up their position, but there was never any doubt of the feelings in the street. Why did we need to worry about a whole continent of black people unable to get their act together? Small wonder a genocide occurred without reaction in Rwanda.

And then along came Osama bin Laden to rescue us from our torpor. We need not dwell on our new unity of purpose; it is a fact. Even on Sept. 11 the country, save for the south end of Manhattan, worked smoothly, only closing down electively what was needed for our safety. It continues to work smoothly, adaptively. That’s what we know how to do. Among the first guys to call our president were the two who had the most in common with us, the most at risk, from the same forces: the presidents of Russia and China. Everyone else got in line and a wholly new concatenation of forces rules the day and world politics. Thank you, Osama.

—26—

Osama bin Laden is, plainly, a fanatic, and fanatics are tacticians, not strategists. Had he known what a favor he would do for us he would not have done it. The fanatic wants a big hit on Broadway, and bin Laden, as best we can gather, worked five years for his big hit, with a doubtful second act possibly to follow. And it only worked because he had a sufficiency of fellow fanatics willing to sacrifice the pleasures of the earth for visions of more in heaven. Most people prefer the kind on earth, and it remains to be seen if he can mobilize a second round based on self-destruction. So we may be worrying beyond our need.

But let us worry. We have seized the moment. At the wretched cost of several thousand good folks, we have a more focused purpose than ever in our history. It happened at the time of a vast budget surplus, when all the “threatened” countries were in a financial and political position to pitch in and assist. “Nous sommes tous Americains,” Le Monde, never

known for its pro-American sentiments, opined. Indeed.

Let us also be clear. Many times that many people have died in single days in other countries, not that long ago, and sometimes at the hands of America. Osama bin Laden not only didn’t deal us a fatal blow; he wakened us from a deadly lethargy. And he did it—as I calculate the alternatives— with relatively little loss of life. Life is never cheap, but the wars that might have come from our self-absorption of days past would have been far, far more expensive. Thank you, Osama.

W. Scott Thompson is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Creating a Sanctuary

by Ch a s Fa g a n ’84

M

y wife, Katie, is reading a favorite picture book to our two daughters. She is twisted in her seat, craning the open book toward the back of our minivan. The pages brush my right shoulder as they are turned. Shouts ring from the back seat, “Pain! Pain!” Katie and I share a startled glance as she stops reading. Sarah, the 18-month-old, is straining against the belts of her car seat, enthusiastically pointing out the window where she has spotted an airplane. (“Plane!”)

Undeterred, Maggie, our 3-year-old, calmly follows with, “Can you read another book, mommy?” and the soothing flow of our long Thanksgiving holiday car trip resumes. I catch a glimpse of a large commercial passenger plane slicing through the clouds. The ever-present filter of 9/11 has made the simple sight of a jet in the sky unsettling. Reality has peeked into our insulated family van. The cadence of Katie’s reading continues.

I have been living in two worlds since Sept. 11, 2001,

and I count myself lucky. At once, I inhabit the real world of adult responsibilities and the sanctuary of happy childhood innocence. In baby dolls, teacups and barrettes I have found balance and determination. My children happen to be at a fortunate age that remains unaffected by the shocking attacks on our country and the shift in global dynamics. Having just turned 3, my oldest is unaware of greater dangers than the monster who occasionally lies under her bed.

The boundaries dividing adulthood and childhood became clear the day of the attacks. After spending that day in a fog, frozen in front of the television, I finally retreated to my studio. There I found the hardened paint brushes I had left unattended since morning. The contrast between the horrific images that had been pressed into my memory and the beautiful serenity of the young woman’s face on the canvas in front of me was disturbing. I started to think of the relative insignificance of artistic endeavors in the shadow of such seismic events. That is, until I heard the back door. Katie was home early with the girls. I ran downstairs to turn off those baneful images on the television before little feet came running

I have been living in two worlds since Sept. 11, 2001, and I count myself lucky.

At once, I inhabit the real world of adult responsibilities and the sanctuary of happy childhood innocence.

—27—

through the living room on their way to the playroom. For the coming months Katie and I constructed our family routine to protect our little girls’ oasis from world news.

Unwittingly, my two toddlers have given me the gift of perspective. With questions from the back seat like, “But Daddy, who will wake up the sun tomorrow morning?” they give me a needed breather from every adult American’s burden of understanding the seriousness of our times. Previous generations have had to shoulder this reality. Now it is our turn to do so, while protecting and cherishing the innocence of the next.

I remember being dismayed by a newspaper article last spring about the deliberate destruction of massive statues carved from cliffs in Afghanistan. I could not fathom the act of pulverizing the impressive artistry and handiwork of ancient craftsmen. The stone figures dated back to a Buddhist society in the fifth century. What group of people would feel so threatened by these quiet, sculpted emissaries from a longpast culture? The question was no longer academic in September, when I watched as they demolished towering symbols of a present society—ours.

In a culture war, one of our greatest weapons is just that: our culture. We should defy our enemies by being more American. In post-9/11 America, we should strive beyond “normalcy” by tackling our work, our goals and our pursuits of happiness with greater vigor. Places like Andover, where both boys and girls are given the chance to discover their own intelligence and curiosity, are now at the forefront of our defiance and defense of our future. Our finis origine pendet.

My own front line on the home front is my couch, where my wife and I read to our girls every night. That is, after they’ve rounded out their daily adventure with a healthy dose of crayons, dancing and pretend. Although my statues are

still dwarfed by those destroyed in Afghanistan, my daily work in my studio has been recharged; clay is being pushed around, paint is flying onto canvases, and the music of The Smashing Pumpkins can be heard from my driveway.

In the rear-view mirror I see sleeping little faces. The rhythmic hush of the dark highway now fills the van, and my mind happily jumps back into their world of innocence.

Thanksgiving Day. Maggie is still pondering who woke up the sun this morning. Extended family gathers at the table, feasts and settles into kitchen duty. The adults are woozy, the children are wired, and I am thankful for this timely American tradition.

The girls are busy shuttling baby dolls from one imaginary bed on the rug to another. Their chatty voices make up an undertone that fleshes out the lively conversation around them. A picture on a magazine cover grabs the attention of Sarah as she walks by the coffee table. Pointing to the picture, she inquires who that might be, “Dat?” With a wave of her hand and an older sister’s you-really-should-know-this tone, Maggie answers, “That’s Santa Claus, Sarah.” A literal gasp silences the whole room. On the cover is a picture of Osama bin Laden. Feeling a smile growing on my face, I am reassured by this absolute confirmation of my little girls’ innocence.

Chas Fagan, an artist, lives with his family in Glenside, Pa. His portraits have included paintings of President Ronald Reagan and of Speaker Thomas Foley. He recently completed sculpting the first of three statues for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Yes, I want a wake-up call—within reason, of course.

William Hamilton/The New York Observer

—28—

It is not so much that in Britain terrorism is a daily fear, but that it is a part of daily life, and life carries on. … So it was now for America, and Britain wept for the loss of innocence as much as for the loss of life.

A View from Afar

by J u l ia G ibert ’72

I

watched the events of Sept. 11 from a distance of thousands of miles. I was working at home in my little English village and exchanging occasional e-mails with an American friend.

“Is your radio on?” he wrote. “Two planes have just flown into the World Trade Center.” I switched on BBC radio and listened for a few minutes.

“They are talking about the problems of nappies in landfill sites,” I wrote back. “The planes flew into the WTC?” I thought my friend must be having trouble with his prepositions.

His response made me turn on the tele. That medium, which seems to me less natural to the British character than radio, was showing live pictures, and I watched as the second tower collapsed.

The British know a lot about living with the random violence of terrorism, and, when I thought about it, the orderly airing of an environmental program in the midst of attacks— even while planes bound for unknown destinations were still being reported missing—was just as I would have expected. It is not so much that in Britain terrorism is a daily fear, but it is a part of daily life, and life carries on. I accidentally leave a bag in the library and I return only minutes later to find the bag sequestered and to receive a cold rebuke for raising unnecessary alarms; someone is careless with a suitcase at Heathrow Airport and we all file out into the car park. Luggage lockers are gone from train stations. Litter bins are scarce.

The precautions reflect real threats. Seventeen years ago we woke up to the news that the hotel in which the prime minister and all her government had gathered for a conference had been blown to pieces. Nearly all the ministers survived, but, with dust still rising from the ruins, the IRA issued a chilling statement: “You have to be lucky all the time; we only have to be lucky once.”

So it was now for America, and Britain wept for the loss of innocence as much as for the loss of life. There was not a hint of exultation—now you see what we have suffered— though there might have been; there is widespread belief here that Americans funded the terrorism of the IRA. There was, instead, simply a recognition of the sense of anger and outrage, a sharing of the grief.

The queen ordered that “The Star Spangled Banner” be played at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace,

and at a special service at St. Paul’s in London she stood and joined in the singing of it herself. The media were amazed.

Her Majesty, they said, had never before been seen to sing the national anthem of another country.

In my little village I walked my dogs, and neighbors approached me as they would someone bereaved. A newcomer down the road who had for months merely glowered at me (not a dog lover, I guess) stopped his car and got out. “You are an American, right?” he asked. I said I was. “I just want to say how sorry I am.”

The following day my next door neighbor of nearly two decades also wanted to make a formal declaration.

“I would just like to say to you, as an American, and to the American people, on behalf of, well, on behalf of myself, how sorry I am.”

I accepted his and others’ sympathy gratefully. I have never felt less foreign than I did that week, nor more longed to be home.

I was at Abbot in the dark, angry days of the Vietnam War, when I would have as soon burned the flag as flown it, and even now I wear my patriotism uneasily. I do not know if what we are doing is right, and I suspect that only the outcome will make it clearer. But what happened on Sept.11 was the talk of playgrounds as well as of cabinet offices, and that is as true here as in the United States.

One morning in mid-September when I coaxed my 9-year-old awake, and she resisted as usual, I spoke, unthinkingly, with mock sternness.

“Catherine,” I said, “little girls have to go to school!”

“Not everywhere, Mummy,” she answered. “In that country America’s going to bomb they’re not even allowed to go.” And she snuggled back under the covers, confident in a point well scored.

So I focus on that and hope for an outcome where all little girls must trundle off to school, where bombs do not lurk in suitcases nor under bus seats nor in litter bins, and neither do they fall from the sky.

—29—

Julia Gibert is a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, where she works for the Rhodes Trust. A former Marshall Scholar, she holds an A.B. degree from Harvard and an M.Phil. degree from Oxford. She is the author of the novel Outward and Visible Signs and the mother of four children.

It’s hard to get even with violent people.

What’s easy is to get more and more like them.

The War So Far by th e R ev. W i l lia m S lo a n e Co ffin Jr. ’4 2

L

ast week I heard of a psychology professor who asked his class how many of them had tried to get even with someone who had done them harm. Over 85 percent raised their hands. Then he asked, “Did getting even end the conflict?”

This time no hands were raised.

By way of illustration, consider the mad spiral of violence that locks Israelis and Palestinians together. Writing in The New York Times, one Israeli said recently, “The lunatic logic of this conflict holds that if you have not responded with full force to the blow you suffered, the other side will interpret it as weakness and will strike you again even more painfully. The result is that each side is doomed to hit its antagonist and then cringes in fear of the counterblow.”

It’s hard to get even with violent people. What’s easy is to get more and more like them. And that leads me to Oct. 7, the day we started bombing Afghanistan. We had suffered anguish. Gone forever were loved ones; gone forever also was the illusion of our invulnerability. Many people said Sept. 11 changed the world. Personally, I believed it would be America’s response that would change the world, and just possibly for the better in far-reaching ways.

On Sept. 20, President George W. Bush ’64 said, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” This eloquent sentence gave rise to the hope that justice might be rendered by law: by international law, by coalition building among many nations deeply sympathetic to our plight, by sharing intelligence, by freezing assets—even by the forceful extradition of terrorists through military action, if internationally sanctioned—and by trials before an appropriate international court.

The president didn’t have to say that the terrorists declared war on America; he could have described them as mass murderers, their deeds as crimes against humanity in a legal, technical sense. He could have added, “We will not respond in kind. We will not seek to avenge the death of innocent Americans by the death of innocent victims elsewhere, lest we become what we abhor. We refuse to ratchet up the cycle of violence that brings only ever more funerals, destruction and deprivation, and ever more senseless rage leading to more, not less, terrorism.” He might even have added, “We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.”

But instead of embracing the force of law, he and the Congress embraced the law of force.

So far, the Afghan campaign has been a military success.

But the bombing has not driven hence all hatred of America.

The spectacle of the most powerful nation on earth pounding into dust one of the poorest struck hard the anti-American nerve across the Islamic world. Europe, too, is cooling on “America’s war.” Now threatening all Afghans, beyond the winter cold and hunger in their drought-stricken, war-ravaged land, is a chaos comparable to the one that brought in the Taliban in the first place. As for Americans, when in Afghanistan it’s over, it won’t be over.

We don’t know what’s next. The question of Iraq has not been resolved, only postponed. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says terrorists live in 50 or more countries. So it behooves us all to give this war on terrorism our full attention, heart, mind and soul. If you consider this war justified, then question its wisdom. After all, everything justifiable is not wise.

Specifically, would it not be wiser, after Afghanistan, to turn from the law of force to the force of law, as earlier described? To suspend bombing, to forget military tribunals, and to remember that a democracy’s values shouldn’t become casualties of war? This is not to advocate appeasement; rather it is to hope that we shall not add to the world’s terror even as we seek to end it. And, of course, it would be a monumental error to try to end terrorism without dealing with the political repression and economic deprivation that fuel it. I’m reminded of our urban riots of 1967. Some senator vowed he’d find out who lit the match. A more intelligent question would have been, “How come there was a fuse attached to a powder keg?”

I hope Americans will feel the sorrow of other nations as much as their own. I hope Americans will realize that fear is the enemy of learning; it gives ignorance its power. Most of all, I hope Americans will not hesitate to voice their misgivings. Dissent isn’t disloyal, subservience is. With so many lives at stake, the greatest sedition could be our silence.

—30—

William Soane Coffin served for 18 years as chaplain of Yale University and was senior minister of Riverside Church in New York for a decade. He is the author of The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality and several other books.

He’s toured the disaster, but only with a deputy mayor.

William Hamilton/The New York Observer

Toward a Better Place

by D ory St reet t ’71

E

ver since participating in my first anti-war protest in 1970 while I was a student at Abbot, I’ve dedicated my life to making the world a better place. Most recently I have been attempting to fulfill this goal by working as a counselor at the American School of Milan, a center for expatriate families that enrolls students from 35 countries.

In watching the airplanes strike the towers on Sept. 11, and seeing it over and over again in the days that followed, my foundations were shaken like everyone else’s. I drew the only conclusion I could: The world is most definitely not a better place.

The catastrophe struck at the end of the day during the second week of school. Our students were filing out to the

buses, oblivious to the unfolding drama: small Korean and South African children pulling wheeled backpacks; boisterous Italian and American middle schoolers jostling each other on the walkway; Swedish and Turkish and Argentine high school students hurrying to the gym for volleyball practice. The shouted mix of languages quieted as the buses departed, and a sort of paralysis settled over those of us who remained.

With the Internet jammed and overseas phone calls impossible, faculty members drifted into a classroom to watch as the story played out on Italian television. At some point after the first tower collapsed, it began to dawn on us that our jobs as educators in a school with students from all over the world had irrevocably changed.

Italy has a pronounced division between its wealthy northern region and the poorer south, and there is a political

Europeans are more familiar with war than Americans are, and they have a better appreciation of the simple things: a good meal, a glass of wine, patting the dogs and playing with the babies.

—31—

faction that believes that the north should cut its connection with the south. In addition, there has recently been a northern movement against immigrants and any group that is perceived as “foreign.” Last May’s national election produced a return to a very conservative government with a strong anti-immigrant bias. Our Italian students, who make up about one-third of the student body, are not immune to this influence, and there was concern over how they might react to the evolving world situation.

Yet the predominant reaction in the immediate aftermath of the crisis was not hatred, but rather a mix of compassion for Americans and worry that if a disaster of this magnitude could befall the United States, then no one is safe. Shopkeepers in our neighborhood who know we are American expressed their sympathy to us as they handed us our receipts. My Italian secretary burst into tears one day over fears for her own personal security as well as the Italian way of life.

Anxious that American institutions worldwide may be targets of terrorism, four Italian families withdrew their children from our school because of concerns about their safety.

Our students have proved to be resilient but not disaffected. Practical considerations, ranging from jitters about flying to concern about applying to U.S. colleges, have brought a different dimension to my work. On a more theoretical level, a Muslim student from Egypt has decided to organize a speaker series on comparative religions so that others might understand the underlying tenets of her faith, rather than focus on the political power plays. Artwork and writing assignments at all grade levels have reflected the children’s responses to Sept. 11.

Among the Americans in our community, all of us— staff, students, parents—have felt disconnected, uprooted and very, very far from our families in the States. Some days, living in Europe feels like cheating, as if I am avoiding all that my countrymen are enduring. At the same time, it also feels safer being here than in the United States. Europeans are more familiar with war than Americans are, and they have a better understanding of the importance of appreciating simple things: a good meal, a glass of wine, patting the dogs and playing with the babies. Perhaps this outlook is the most useful antidote to the tragedy.

For weeks after Sept. 11, I could not shake the feeling my life was futile and senseless. I wanted to crawl under some seaweed on the rocky shore of Penobscot Bay. I longed for the familiarity of family, friends and home, even as I knew all of that had changed forever. Gradually, however, I have begun to believe people when they remind me that the world would be an even worse place had I not been working for all these years to make it better. Although things will never be the same, a semblance of normalcy has returned to our lives here. The Italian government continues to post a 24-hour Carabinieri guard outside the school gates, and field trips are still limited.

But now, more than ever, those of us in fields like education realize the importance of trying to make positive changes.

And so we move forward, all over the globe.

Dory Streett is the high school counselor at the American School of Milan. She and her family moved to Italy from their home in Maine in August 2000.

Even as we lick our wounds, the United States has used the disaster to condone a selfish, arrogant foreign policy.

A Crack in the System

by L u cy L ip p a rd ’54

I

s there anything left on the subject that hasn’t been said? It’s a temptation to make my contribution a conceptual artwork: a black-bordered box with the words: “Everything that has been and will be spoken and written and thought about September 11th R.I.P.” Yet as a native New Yorker I can’t get Black Tuesday out of my mind, and as a writer I can’t stop looking for words with which to exorcise a continuous loop of home movies. I see my only grandson and only daughter-in-law running up West Broadway from P.S. 234 while the towers crumble behind them, leaving thousands dead. And now, superimposed, I see equally innocent Afghan women and children running through other streets, having witnessed all too often the horror we have seen only once.

We have created an enemy and then a war out of a ghastly terrorist act. Even as we lick our wounds, the United States has used the disaster to condone a selfish, arrogant foreign policy. September’s events are also being used to excuse a series of appallingly repressive legislations: the anti-terrorist act, which bodes ill for any opposition; the shameful giveaways of the “economic stimulus” act and callous disregard for the growing number of unemployed; police-state-inspired military tribunals; violation of privacy between accused criminals and their attorneys; suppression of demonstrations; clandestine arrests; blacklists; information blackouts and press lockouts. And—nothing is unrelated—potential pillaging of the environment, especially in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, despite falling gas prices.

Worse still, in the long run, pervasive chauvinism and xenophobia have encouraged censorship, from the craven unanimity of congressional votes to timidity in academia and the arts. If we expect to be respected globally as a free society, why discard the freedoms we take for granted? This is an attack on democracy, ironically mounted in the name of democracy.

I write about the effects of visual culture on society in general. Images are the artist’s currency. Yet I’ve seen no photographs of the towers struck, crumbling, fallen, as powerful as those I imagined while listening to the radio early in the morning of Sept. 11. How, I wonder, will the arts communities respond to the challenge of making sense (and some healthy nonsense) of what is happening on today’s battlefields?

If Black Tuesday is indeed the turning point we think it is, what a pity that the turn cannot be taken in a different direction. What if this were a time to reconsider not only our foreign policy and our domestic priorities, but our way of life, our culture, as well? What if this temporary crack in the system opened doors to a new form of activism? What if humility became as popular as patriotic posturing? What if waste and consumption became as unpopular as criticism of the government and anti-war demonstrations? What if racism gave way to respect, and intelligent dialogue replaced governmental manipulation? What if we actually changed? Imagine.

Remains of Tower 2 reflect the dawn.

Several buildings (left) were also severely damaged.

This iconic piece of debris may become part of a memorial at the site, photographer Samantha Appleton reports.

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Lucy Lippard is a cultural critic who has been described variously as a popular feminist, art critic, theorist and political activist.

She is the author or editor of over two dozen books, most recently On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place. A New Yorker by birth, she makes her home in Galisteo, N.M.

Contrary to appearances, waging peace is actually harder than waging war.

But, through the intervention of the third side, it is possible.

Under a goofy caricature of a golfer, what usually read, “Congratulations Suzie and Joe” now said, “God Bless America. Stay Strong.”

God Bless America

A Global Immune System

by Wi lli a m U r y ’ 70

T

errorism is like a virus. It is invisible. It is spread throughout the body politic—terrorists are operating in over 60 countries around the world. It can lie latent for a long time; hidden terrorist cells are patiently waiting for a moment to strike. It flourishes when the immune system is weak.

The question I have is: What would a strong immune system look like? What is capable of holding the virus of extreme violence in check?

I cannot claim to have an answer, but I do have a hunch, based on my experiences over the past two decades working as a third party in such intractable situations as those in Chechnya, Northern Ireland and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—all marked by recurrent terrorism.

Such conflicts are usually portrayed as two-sided. It is Russians vs. Chechens, Catholics vs. Protestants, Arabs vs.

Israelis. We tend to forget there is always a third side. What I call the “third side” is the surrounding community within which any conflict takes place. The third side consists of bystanders, neutral parties, friends and allies who can help to contain the violence, to resolve the underlying conflicts and to prevent conflict by addressing its root causes.

If we’d had a healthy global immune system in place prior to Sept. 11, the third side—individuals, organizations, national governments and the United Nations—might have been hard at work playing a host of preventive third-side roles. Ideally, witnesses would have informed us of the terrorists’ plans. Security forces acting as peacekeepers would have arrested the terrorists and frustrated their plots.

Mediators would have been working to resolve conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Equalizers would have been building democracy in places where it is badly needed.

Bridge-builders would have been building bridges between the Islamic and Western worlds. Teachers would have been busy teaching about the tragic futility of violence and about peaceful ways of dealing with differences. Providers would have been addressing the conditions of insecurity, deprivation, shame and repression that can breed terrorism.

No one third-side role is sufficient to stop violence. The roles constitute a series of protective safety nets. If one

doesn’t catch the conflict and stop it from escalating, another will. Together, these roles constitute a systemic approach to what is, after all, a systemic problem.

Containing the threat of terrorism will not work if one does not immediately follow up with resolution of conflicts and attention to frustrated basic human needs.

While there is no guarantee that such a system would have forestalled the Sept. 11 attacks, the chances of prevention would have been greatly enhanced. Prevention is the key word. The third side—the community—works to catch dangerous conflicts early, before they get too hot. In the words of Shakespeare, “A little fire is quickly trodden out which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.”

It will not be easy to strengthen humanity’s social immune system. Contrary to appearances, waging peace is actually harder than waging war. But, through the intervention of the third side, it is possible. I have seen the third side help end apartheid in South Africa and transform conflict in Northern Ireland.

An old Irish saying asks, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get in?” The lesson of Sept. 11 is that, in this increasingly interdependent world, there are no private fights. Each affects us all.

Each of us has a third-side role to play in strengthening the social immune system against violence. Anyone can play the role of witness, peacekeeper, mediator or teacher of non-violent conflict resolution. We can do this in our homes, in our schools, in our neighborhoods and in our nations. We can do it around the world. This kind of patriotism can truly help make our children and ourselves safe from violence.

There is an old African proverb that goes, “When spider webs unite, they can halt even a lion.” Each of the actions any individual, organization or government may take is like a single spider web. Alone it is not sufficient, but united with the actions of others it is capable of halting even the lion of violence and terrorism.

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William L. Ury directs the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard Universityʼs Program on Negotiation. He is co-author of Getting to Yes and author of Getting Past No and, most recently, The Third Side.

by D avid Ot h m er ’59

O

n Sept. 11, just as the sun was setting, ironically gloriously, over the Duffer’s Pub on U.S. Route 1 south of Philadelphia, a young man was climbing down a ladder where he and a young woman had just finished new lettering for the Duffer’s Pub sign. Under a goofy caricature of a golfer, what usually read, “Congratulations Suzie and Joe” or “Super Happy Hour, 5-7” now said, “God Bless America.

Stay Strong. Stay Together.”

We all admired their handiwork. They went back to the subdued atmosphere of the outdoor bar, and I kept driving home.

Since then, signs that initially said just “God Bless America” have gradually changed.

Some are simple. In front of a large pizza chain is one that says, “G od B less T he USA. C arry O ut L g C heese $599.”

In front of a restaurant I read, “G od B less O ur T roops . S at D ance . T u .—T hur ., P sychic . C ashier N eeded .”

Some are more complex. Outside the Risque Video store on Sept. 10, the sign read, “DVD S ale . B uy 2 G et 1 F ree F rom $19.99—$35.”

On Sept 12, it read, “G od B less A merica ” On Sept. 24, it read, “DVD S ale . B uy 2 G et 1 F ree F rom $19.99—$35. G od B less A merica .”

And on Oct. 30 it read, “F all M ovie S ale . T hree 4 hr M ovies $20. 100 s T o C hoose F rom . G od B less A merica .”

God Bless America, indeed.

David Othmer is a media consultant who studies signs while driving to his vineyard in southeastern Pennsylvania.

He worked in public broadcasting for over 25 years at WNET in New York and WHYY TV 12 and 91FM in Philadelphia. His enthusiasm was largely responsible for persuading the Andover Bulletin to put together this special supplement.

Bill Lee, a storeowner in Chinatown, tapes a flag to his storefront the day after the tragedy.

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A local patriot waves flags for rescue workers as smoke from the burning Ground Zero site still billows in the background.

Supplement to the Andover Bulletin Winter 2002 Produced by the Office of Communications Editor: Theresa Pease tpease@andover.edu Art Director: Ellen Hardy Photography: Samantha Appleton ’93 Illustrations: William Hamilton ’58

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