I stood outside an Italian restaurant at 10 o'clock Friday night on a dirty Boston street, cradling a tiny espresso cup with a burning candle inside.
With the post-attack news cycle slowing, CNN and others have turned to human interest reporting to fill the airwaves. As good news organizations do, they've depicted this tragedy from an incredible range of vantage points. Middle American farmers. Relatives of the missing. Arab-Americans. Soccer moms. Soldiers. Firefighters. Fathers.
I see people trying to help, people whose work keeps us fed, keeps us safe, keeps us healthy. People who, in their small ways, make this country move by doing their best every day at whatever they do.
But where am I?
I spent this summer in an office three blocks north of 14th Street, working for an entertainment magazine. I lived and breathed New York, the most fantastic, most diverse, most daunting yet alluring city on earth. But, like all impetuous love affairs, my time with the city was finite. I left New York in mid-August to start law school at Harvard.
Today, friends who worked near the World Trade Center are staying home because their offices are structurally unsound. Two of my Newsweek friends spent last Tuesday night scurrying from story to story, reporting on the goings-on at mosques, morgues and hospitals. One of them even made it to ground zero, where she managed to get a hell of a story. She told me the other day that it still didn't seem real.
It didn't seem real here, either. By Wednesday, my law school routine was back to normal. We were back to talking about torts and contracts and civil procedure.
Actually, one professor dedicated class to talking about the attack. There were the expected calls for revenge, the expressions of confusion and fear and the concerns about friends and loved ones whose destiny remained uncertain.
What I did not expect were comments that, to me, verged dangerously on equivocation, or even justification, for this thing that has happened to us. Some seemed to suggest that we were reaping the sour fruits of Iran-Contra, Operation Desert Storm, American global hegemony, even slavery. That Osama bin Laden's hatred was justifiable and the violence explicable. That this catastrophe was no worse than the terrible suffering that happens around the world every day.
Our country, like all nations, has a legacy that is at times messy and at others downright ugly. But to draw any parallel, or worse, try to establish an appropriate causal relationship between this heinous, violent assault and our nation's history is wrongheaded and inappropriate.
This act's motivation was not politics, but hate. This act's victims were not political. They were not combatants. They were not citizens of a nation at war. They were bankers, waiters, bureaucrats and parents--people who were in no way responsible for U.S. history or policies. Our tragedy is not more important because so many of the people were Americans. It should be important to us because it is ours to deal with.
Firefighters, cops and politicians were trying to restore order that Wednesday morning. My fellow Harvard Law students and I were busy having a class discussion.
What most frustrated me about the dialogue was not that I didn't agree with some of what was said but that what was said cost so little. We had the privilege of sitting in an academic enclave where any opinion is given credence, where any idea is worth debate. The academy--be it Harvard, Duke or elsewhere--is often a venue where all the hot air amounts to nothing. Although several actions of President Nan Keohane's administration made a mockery of what I believe in during my years at Duke, I hoped that attending a different university would diminish my disgust with the academy. This disaster has only magnified it.
I was safe in my classroom, but I was also impotent. While the rest of this country was uniting to solve this crisis, we over-privileged students were trying to argue both sides of the story. We languished in a safe lecture hall as others were preparing to give their lives to secure us the right to do so.
In academic climates rank with privilege and token radicalism, people tend to forget that their easy lives are not free. We are the heirs of a birthright that others are still paying for. We are the heirs of a nation's mixed legacy that it is our duty not merely to criticize, but to improve.
There is a great deal of merit to being able to see both sides of an issue. That is what a rational person does. But a person with integrity, a person with courage--an American--also takes a stand for what he believes in.
Our time in the academy is finite. It is a time to bask in the freedom of cheap ideology and proselytize about things we often know very little about. But one day, many of our words won't be so costless. They will affect decisions; they will affect lives. In some cases, they will affect nations. But right now, my words can't change the pall over this one.
And that is the most frustrating sensation of all.
Jonas Blank, Trinity '01, attends Harvard University School of Law and is a former editor of Recess.
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