Saving our Souls

I was standing in the bathroom of my house in Nashville, drying my hair -- oh, how long it's been since my hair has been so long that I had to blow it dry! I was listening to a horrible morning show on the radio, broadcast over the only station that the cheap radio I kept in the bathroom could receive clearly.

I was running uncharacteristically early that day. It was a Tuesday morning, and that meant lab meeting at nine o'clock -- sharp. I was only two or three days back into town, having returned from a trip to North Carolina. I had gone to my ten year high school reunion, and driven with my mother and younger niece to visit my father's sister in upstate New York.

The voice of one of the morning personalities emanating from the radio became different, more urgent. He said that a plane had collided with the World Trade Center building in New York. With each passing moment he shared more details, almost as soon as he got them, or so it seemed. Then, silence.

Turn off the radio, he said. Get to a television set or, failing that, turn the radio to a news station.

I ran into the living room and turned on the television. And I saw smoke billowing out of one of the World Trade Center buildings. I awoke my roommate whose bedroom door adjoined the living room. I grabbed my cell phone and called my friend Joel who, as far as I knew, was still in New York City and working downtown. I couldn't reach him and grew a bit panicked. About the time the plane hit the second tower, Joel called my cell phone. He had left the city a couple of weeks prior and returned to North Carolina; in our traveling about we had not kept up with each other in the previous few weeks. Reassured in the knowledge that no one I knew was anywhere near the scene of the tragedy occurring before my eyes, before the eyes of the nation and of the world, I forced myself to continue getting ready to leave for work.

During the drive to the lab I listened to the local NPR station, and heard about what happened at the Pentagon. At work we had our lab meeting, but none of us could focus on the task at hand. My boss assured us that there was nothing we could do, that we should get done what needed to get done that day and try not to think about the horror unfolding in the northeast. All day we tried to reach news websites -- CNN, the New York Times page, MSNBC -- all to no avail. We kept NPR playing all day, hoping to learn how this had happened, and who was taking responsibility, who would feel the full brute strength of a wronged United States of America marching in to avenge her innocent dead.

Ironically I had been in New York City over the Independence Day holiday just a few weeks prior. I had tickets to go to the observation deck at the World Trade Center, but decided not to go because of limited time. It will be there the next time I visit, I had reassured myself.

Since September 11, 2001, I have visited the site where the towers stood. I saw the movie World Trade Center on Labor Day, and was surprised that I was able to hold my emotions in check during and after the film -- just reading the review of United 93 in the New York Times a few monts earlier caused me to well up. I thought maybe, just maybe, I was emotionally ready to put this horrible event behind me. But I was wrong.

I have cried more times today than I can count -- during the singing of the national anthem this morning at the ceremonies at Ground Zero; as Dateline NBC was talking to survivors of United flight 93; as widows and widowers were speaking of their deceased spouses this morning.

But I know that my sadness now comes not only from the devastating tragedy of 9/11, but also from how badly President Bush and his administration have responded to 9/11, and how they have nearly exhausted every shred of goodwill and solidarity other nations expressed in the aftermath of the terror attacks. The President and his aides espouse the view that we must make America safer, and that secret CIA prisons, "alternative questioning methods" and the war in Iraq are all means towards that end.

Must making America safer necessarily require us, as a nation, to lose our souls?

Do we have to destroy everything that America stands for to keep Americans safe?

I pray not. Otherwise the nearly 3000 people who died that day, and the more than 2000 soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, have all died in vain.