Facing the Changes
The Philadelphia Inquirer
September 23, 2001
Following the Sept. 11 calamity, the Inquirer set up a listserv on which
four University of Pennsylvania students traded e-mails about the crisis and
its consequences. Allie D'Augustine is a senior majoring in English and working
at Kelly Writers House. Josh Boyette is a sophomore English and theater major.
Adrienne Mishkin is a junior undergraduate double major in English and the
biological basis of behavior. Fran Ryan is a fifth-year graduate student specializing
in 20th-century U.S. history.
Below are edited selections from their exchange, in which they think aloud
about their generation's response to the frightening new world of terrorism
and its aftermath
Sept. 14, 6 p.m., from Adrienne Mishkin:
I am the third generation of my family to live in Manhattan. Everyone
I've known for more than two years is in New York City. I don't know how
to express my emotions. Sad. Scared. Impending doom. What I don't feel
is angry. I don't know too many people from Manhattan who feel angry.
I am scared that we'll be hit again, and just as scared we'll kill innocent
people in the process of trying to defend ourselves.
One of my friends, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, said to me, "You
know, I'm a pacifist . . . but I'm also from New York." I think that
is a pretty good expression of how I feel. I don't want to see a single
extra person's blood shed on either side. I consider an Afghan's life
as important, as good, as real, as worth protecting as a New Yorker's.
At the same time, I can't but acknowledge that if we do nothing, chances
are great of more blood being shed, and of that blood being American.
I don't understand how we can declare war on Afghanistan; a country undergoing
civil war now. Not so much because we shouldn't bother a country already
at war, but because clearly so many people there don't side with the Taliban,
and are in fact fighting them. Not for our sake, of course, but how can
we hold those people as responsible as the actual masterminds of our recent
tragedies? Declaring war on Afghanistan would effectively be doing just
that.
Sept. 14, 10:38 p.m., from Adrienne Mishkin:
I think the first person we kill just to see their blood is one too many.
Sept 15, 1:32 a.m., from Allie D'Augustine:
That term that gets used, collateral damage, brings a huge degree of detachment
to an intensely difficult issue. I can't imagine coming up with some kind
of round number or percentage of innocent lives lost that's acceptable.
So my answer really is, I don't know. I just don't know.
Sept. 15, 12:31 p.m., from Josh Boyette:
I'm not surprised that it could have happened. We've been told for years
we're not ready to counter a serious terrorist attack. A friend was telling
me that a similar scene played itself out in the end of a Tom Clancy book.
And airport security? It really is a joke. I'm pretty confident I could
sneak a knife onto a plane, and I'm a 19-year-old kid.
But knowing that it could happen couldn't prepare me for the fact that
it actually did. People say things like "I don't believe it"
all the time, but that's how I felt, in my gut: that this couldn't be
happening, that I wouldn't believe it. The scariest part is that it could
get worse. That it's not over. The old world died on Tuesday, and we're
living in a new one.
Sept. 15, 1:19 p.m., from Josh Boyette:
I think the more important question about collateral damage is: How many
dead American soldiers can we stand? Bush is calling this a war, and it
is. But we're not going to win any war if we bomb a million Afgans and
miss Osama bin Laden who is hiding in a bunker two towns over. Are we
willing to accept the risk to Americans? Can we watch our soldiers die?
Can we cheer them on while they are blown up in midnight raids and guerrilla
ambushes? These terrorist organizations will pose the same problems as
the Vietcong, except that we don't know where their bases are. This is
not the gulf war. This is not World War II. Osama bin Laden doesn't have
a Baghdad or Berlin we can march to.
Just as Vietnam was the Immoral War, this will be the Moral War. This
time we have right on our side, the first time we've had right on our
side since World War II. But that's not going to make it any easier to
watch soldiers. It's not going to make it any easier to count body bags.
Can America deal with that?
Sept. 15, 2:17 p.m., from Adrienne Mishkin:
A lot of Americans don't seem to care if we do kill "a million Afghans,"
even if those million are all civilians. And I do care. I don't think
that those people are at fault for what happened, and I don't want to
see any more blood than is absolutely necessary.
One of my roommates asked me last night to consider the following scenario:
"Let's say that you had a total guarantee that this wasn't going
to happen again; Osama bin Laden and all of his followers were never going
to be violent again. Plus, you had a guarantee that this entire event
and its outcome would have no impact on future terrorists' plans in any
way. Wouldn't you want Osama bin Laden and his followers to be dead, just
out of retribution?"
My answer is and will continue to be no. I don't want to see any more
blood, not anyone's.
American lives are of course important for us to protect, but I think
our greater calling here is to be saving as many total lives as possible.
Sept. 16, 1:15 p.m., from Fran Ryan:
As a person who loves cities, I worry the tragedies will intensify a prejudice
many people already hold: that cities are somehow inherently dangerous.
That the fear of danger will continue the movement away from urban centers,
toward suburban business centers and residential patterns. Businesses
are already responding in this fashion.
Cities are important to democracy. They are not virtual. To walk across
the city is a physical act. This act of being in the city has to do with
being around people in a very intense way. (That realization makes the
images of Sept. 11 so devastating for me - the people in those buildings
and the unspeakable loss. It remains unspeakable. No one has yet articulated
what this feels and means. We are still stuttering.)
Sept. 16, 6:36 p.m., from Josh Boyette:
All we have is a really big hammer, and the terrorists are like drops
of water. The world is a dangerous, evil place. More and more, Anne Frank's
belief in humanity's inherent goodness seems naive.
The evil has come home. It's been a long time coming, and some have known
for awhile. But now we all know.
Sept. 16, 9:19 p.m., from Allie D'Augustine:
I heard a quote from David Foster Wallace, from his novel Infinite Jest:
"No single moment is in and of itself unendurable." I don't
know if I believe that, but it's a nice thought.
On chowhound.com, a food-related website with a big New York contingent,
discussion has moved away from people checking in with one another and
segued right into the idea that we should support Middle Eastern restaurants.
Jim Leff, who runs the site, finally came out with this: "I've resolved
to eat only in Middle Eastern restaurants for the foreseeable future.
I will offer my goodwill, my help, and my love for neighbors as indiscriminately
as a terrorist offers his hatred and violence. Because this attitude is
the only antidote to the biological weapon released with this attack -
the hypercontagious virus of hate and suspicion." This is a visceral,
immediate response. It's something that we can actually do and connect
to (now that the blood banks have more donors than they can handle, and
food and supplies have come in such quantities that we've all been told
to stop sending things). And it seems much more real to me than discussions
of whether we should be going to war, which is a concept I can't quite
grasp. I keep turning to books and literature, and now I'm thinking about
Tim O'Brien's amazing book The Things They Carried. I read it this past
spring, and it left me stunned. It's about Vietnam, part fiction, semiautobiographical,
and the lines are blurred intentionally - the implication is that the
details don't matter; the larger truths about war and humanity remain
the same even as each individual story has its own horrific slant.
Sept. 17, 12:50 p.m., from Fran Ryan:
I've been listening to AM talk radio a lot in the evenings, which gives
some insight into things. One caller said that "American youth have
been spoiled and that ultimately, this is a good thing for us, because
now we'll finally understand what America means." It struck me as
particularly bizarre and mean-spirited. It implies that there have been
no problems before. The crux of the comment sheds some light on how fragmented
America is, especially along class and racial lines. I thought of the
millions of young Americans, disproportionately African American, for
whom everyday life has always brought uncertainty, often in terms that
resemble the conditions of war. Comments like the one I heard on the radio
display a lack of understanding of the economic and social problems facing
many citizens of the United States, for whom the horrible events of last
week merely stand out as an amplification of a situation already steeped
in violence.
Sept. 17, 4:53 p.m., from Fran Ryan:
Everyone is dealing with this in different ways, and there is no sense
in judging that. I was talking to someone the other night who had plans,
and she said she felt weird about going about things in a normal way.
I hear a lot of people saying that, and I feel it, too.
Sept. 19, 11:09 a.m., from Josh Boyette:
What do I hope? I hope that Bush really can make the world a safer place.
Who knows? Maybe he can. I hope that whoever did this dies. I really do.
I hope that the world realizes that terrorism is not a legitimate means
of political expression. I hope that Arafat stops the intifada. I hope
that Ariel Sharon has enough faith in Arafat to allow him to stop the
intifada. I hope that any military conflict is short and successful. I
hope we don't lose too many American soldiers. I hope we don't kill too
many innocent Afgans. I hope I don't get drafted. I hope it doesn't happen
again. I hope I never forget. God help us all.
Sept. 18, 3:25 p.m., from Adrienne Mishkin:
I still have a lot of anxiety about what this country is going to decide
to do, and what kinds of social and economic effects that will have on
us as citizens. It was good to see how quickly some things went back to
normal. I feel we're waiting to see what happens in the next few weeks.
Bush has taken some steps to securing our country's future, and I definitely
think that a large part of this country has increased faith in him as
a president, as well as a renewed sense of American patriotism.
For the long term, I'm hoping that this doesn't create a situation akin
to that of Japanese Americans in World War Two. I know of Arabic people
here, people who are completely Americanized, who are facing a terrible
lack of support, even from their friends.
Sept. 19, 5:37 p.m., from Fran Ryan:
I have taken a lot of comfort in our discussion, and it has meant a lot
to talk it over in this format. Overall, things are still too close to
really understand much about what has changed. On the el today, a friend
said something that stuck with me. He mentioned how he thought that he
never imagined something like this would happen in his lifetime - that
before last week, he imagined that he would continue to live his life
as easily as he had, concentrating on the things that mattered to him,
building a life, but not experiencing much conflict on such a large, collective
scale. He was watching Band of Brothers on HBO, thinking of the sacrifices
of that generation, thinking of his grandparents. He said that he thought
that history was over. And now somehow, our sense of time - and relation
to things in the past - has altered totally. He and I both are unsure
how, but we think it has.