Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Ellen Goodman

Tuesday morning our world changed. I say it that simply because there is no need for melodrama in our mourning. The facts will do.

On September 11, four planes took off in synchronized suicide.

Two left the airport that I know as well as my own neighborhood and slammed into twin towers proud enough to challenge the Manhattan sky and ordinary enough for tens of thousands of people to call it "the office."

A third dove into the defenseless center of our national defense.

A fourth, headed God knows where, made a big crater in Pennsylvania.

On television, all day and night, the videotape from lower Manhattan replayed in an endless loop. We watched the tape like survivors obsessively retelling the same story. We watched the plane crash again and again. Watched the towers melt and collapse. Watched as if eventually, if we witnessed it often enough, stared at it long enough, we would believe our own eyes.

But 24 hours later, even a construction worker from a nearby building who had witnessed the attacks, who had counted 43 people choosing air over fire as they jumped from the towers, could only say, "It was like the worst movie I'd ever seen."

What a lens from which to view this horror story, as if movies were our only, innocent, frame of reference. Have most Americans only faced deep national fear as a special effect?

All summer, the news that filled the airwaves seemed at times like a trivial pursuit. The TV and newsmagazines made sharks our No. 1 enemy. The cable shows covered Gary Condit like a blanket.

Stories on "air rage" chronicled the anger of passengers at planes that were ... late. And even the news of repeated suicide bombings in Israel had become, I am ashamed to say, numbingly ordinary.

Some evenings, I turned the TV news on, heard the headlines and turned it off declaring scornfully, "No news tonight." Yet I knew always, deep down, what a luxury it is to live with "no news." What a profound and spendthrift luxury to feel removed, even immune, from the world. To feel safe.

In the midst of this attack, Americans had to reach back 60 years into our grab bag of metaphors to find a Day of Infamy. After all, since then generations of Americans have lived, in many ways, a charmed life.

Some of us have held onto that charm tightly, anxiously, ever since we were taught to duck and cover in the schoolroom. We felt our luck shaken at those times when Kennedy stood off Khruschev over Cuba, when hostages were taken in Iran, when a government building was brought down in Oklahoma City.

But we've only known war offshore. We've only known intellectually the ease with which a cosmopolitan city like Sarajevo can be reduced to rubble. The ease with which cities like Jerusalem and Belfast can become war zones.

We pushed aside the sense of our vulnerability--not to a nation-enemy with a missile, but to a handful of men armed with plastic knives and hatred.

Now terror has become our reality show. A so-called World Trade Center has become another vulnerable local bazaar. Survivor is no longer entertainment. And we recoil when Palestinians on the West Bank celebrate the toppling of American towers as it if were--to them--only a movie.

Today, we search for souls left in the rubble of these buildings. We search as intently for the trail that led onto those planes and for the villains who didn't die in the wreckage of their own making.

At the same time, our own connections grow as we search the lists of victims. Our luck has changed. We call ourselves lucky now if there is one degree of separation between us and the neighbor hijacked on American Airlines 11. We call our life charmed now if a cousin had not gotten to the office yet. Blessed now to learn that a friend's brother-in-law got down the 45 flights.

The television reporters refer to the site of the World Trade Center as Ground Zero. I would not tempt the fates that way. We need no more metaphors.

But our world has changed. Terrorism they call it, as if it were a philosophy or a political party. The point of terrorism, said more than one political leader, is the terror.

Mission accomplished.