Inside
NCR
It was just minutes before the start
of our daily morning meeting when someone called from the outside and told us
to check CNN. A plane had just hit the World Trade Center in New York.
By the time we got to the TV, the second plane had hit. I could
feel the chill on my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stand up for a
split second at the incredible videotape. That airliner had banked and turned
so purposefully into the building, a direct hit on the second tower, that the
conclusion in my head needed no prompting from the screen. Terrorists. A
chilling act of wanton killing.
History was changed. We would never be the same.
My 27-year-old daughter,
Rebecca, lives in New York. Her apartment is about a 20-minute walk from the
World Trade Center. The office where she works is further uptown. I remember
the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. I worked in Manhattan that year and
recall the eerie, detached sense I had at the time, how separated I was from
such a momentous event in the same city where I worked. I learned more about it
at home watching television than I did in the street. I tried calling Beck. So
had my wife, Sally. No lines available. Just a busy signal. We worried briefly
together over the phone. Shes OK, I said to myself. She has nothing to do
with the World Trade Center. But what if this day someone invited her to
breakfast, or for some reason she had a meeting? Shes not in finance, I
told myself. Shes not at the level nor in a business where shed be
meeting someone at the World Trade Center for breakfast.
And so the day would swing between
personal concerns and the big picture madness that kept exploding, movie-like,
on the little screen. It swung between the horror I felt when I allowed myself
to contemplate the innocent lives snuffed out and the feeling of simply being
overwhelmed, trying to fathom the amount of sustained hatred and resolve
necessary to contemplate, plan and execute such deeds.
When the plane slammed into the Pentagon the tags on the screen
changed from Terror to Attack on America, and the tag
in my head said: war. Against whom? And why? Would someone take responsibility
for it? None of the answers was going to come fast, but an act of war had been
committed, that was certain. By mid-morning, after both buildings had collapsed
upon themselves and one section of the Pentagon was in flames, Publisher Tom
Fox gathered the company for a brief period of prayer. Pat Marrin, editor of
Celebration, spoke of the images that accompany apocalyptic sentiments: not
knowing the hour or the day and the thief in the night, on one hand, the notion
of hope and rebirth on the other.
We were groping, as all were, for some sense of understanding of
events that fit no normal categories.
A quick check of e-mail
back at my desk showed one from Beck. An understated two lines -- that there
was a bit of a stir in Manhattan this morning. Later she would
expand on her feelings in other e-mails, about the closings of bridges and
tunnels and the certain inconveniences to come, of mourning for the victims, to
thoughts of the inconveniences most of the world lives with, to a hope that
popular talk she was already hearing about bombing others would fade.
Funny -- were not invincible, she ended one note.
A psychological switch had been
flipped. On Sept. 11, we realized in a new way how vulnerable we really are. I
thought of the fear -- minute by these circumstances -- that went through my
family some years ago when we returned home from a Christmas vacation to find
our house had been ransacked and burglarized. What had been safe haven had
become infected with something faceless, menacing and sinister.
As a country, now, we feel exposed and vulnerable. The faces of
those who witnessed the tragedy, the sickness in the pit of my stomach -- I
have seen and felt it before, among villagers in the Guatemalan highlands and
in those living on the side of a volcano in El Salvador, in Iraqs Baghdad
and Basra. The utter disruption of daily routine, the search among normal
people for normal words, the words we can call to mind to explain the
inexplicable. On Sept. 11, we joined the rest of the human community in a way
no one had ever wished. Now we share awful wounds and misery.
Son Daniel, who was
vacationing in Oregon and had just come down from camping in the mountains,
called. No television. At first he thought the news told by some guy at a gas
station was a strange joke. He couldnt get in touch with Beck, he said. I
assured him she was safe. Soon after, son Will from Texas called asking the
same. By days end, we would hear the same question from friends and
family across the country and from Italy and Australia. How can boundaries be
simultaneously so utterly meaningless yet so divisive?
During a later editorial meeting, we
decided to drop everything we had previously planned for this issue and
concentrate solely on the events of the day. Our attempt is to dig deep into
the heart and soul of NCR to help you think about the awful terror
visited on us as a people. The full dimensions of these horrible acts will
unravel only slowly. How to understand them will occur only with time. We hope
that what you find in this issue will be a first step toward understanding.
This edition of NCR ends up an offering of the broad community of
writers and people in other parts of the company here who weekly gather around
this project. Pat Marrin agreed to expand on his brief, spoken reflections at
our prayer gathering. His words grace our front page and accompany the photos
on Pages 11-14. Our columnists, very busy people all, responded immediately to
our requests and turned out pieces in a matter of hours.
Our writers, inhouse and freelancers, dug in to chronicle how the
religious and peace communities were responding to the tragedies of the day and
what they see ahead for the long haul. Frequent contributor Patrick
ONeill pitched in as he waited for reassurance that his brother, a New
York police officer on duty in Manhattan at the time of the bombings, was all
right. (It came.) Throughout the paper, I think you will find a remarkable
breadth of thought and considered opinion about enormously complex issues.
I woke the day after the attacks to
hear someone on the radio telling me that I was waking up in a new country.
Things had changed that much. Beck wrote of the disturbing stillness of the
city and the fact that she now must show identification to get back into her
neighborhood. Life has been disrupted in ways too huge to calculate at this
moment, and yet so much of life goes on. I cant help thinking that these
attacks are so sadly a continuation of the unparalleled violence of the century
just ended. With a twist. If the initial speculation holds that this emanated
from a rogue figure in the hills of Afghanistan, then it is, in its own way, a
crime freakishly aligned with the 21st-century landscape: an open act of war
against a superpower by men virtually without a country. As one of the pieces
that got held from this special issue asserts, the paradigms have shifted, the
old poles dont hold. Things have changed that much.
Much of what you will find in this
issue speaks to what may lie ahead. We will be drawn to deep questions, about
ourselves as a nation, about ourselves as people of faith. We will be asked to
make judgments about justice and retribution, about proportionality and
vengeance. New strategies will be put in place and large sums of new money will
bolster efforts to protect our borders and to ratchet up national security. All
the more reason we must remain diligent in protecting those who now become
increasingly vulnerable to hysteria. Within 12 hours of the attacks, it was
reported that Islamic schools in Kansas City and St. Louis were shut down
because of threats.
Having been drawn to deep questions,
we will be forced to draw from the depths of our spiritual and religious
traditions. We, perhaps, will see our sacred texts in new ways, our brothers
and sisters of other faiths in new light. At the moment, the Psalmists
aching lament, Forgotten among the dead, buried with the slaughtered for
whom you care no more makes sense. God alone seems large enough to absorb
the anger and the frustration.
Somewhere deep inside is the flicker of hope those texts also
point to. Now, though, it must be a stubborn hope, if hope at all. A stubborn
hope that accompanies each tiny step toward understanding the latest craziness,
each tiny step toward others who keep the light of peace flickering. And the
stubborn hope pushes, step by step, to a horizon of enthusiastic hope in the
texts promise of new life.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 21,
2001
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