Guest Editorial:
Impressions of an Edgewater Resident
by Alison Evans-Fragale
Like everyone in the United States and around the world, I share the deep sadness at the deaths of thousands. I also grew up here and I live and work here, and every day since the attack I see the faces of people in pain, the candlelight memorials, the “missing people” posters, and I treat the victims of fire and stress. I hear the stories from the people who experienced them first hand. I remember going to the roof of the tower before the safety fence had been put in because a friend’s father helped to engineer the building.
Happy memories of my past are being erased by grave images of the present. Sad memories of this tragedy fill my short-term memory, and I fear that they will forever remain in my long-term memory...
Why, just last Tuesday, I was looking up into the clouds and praying and a stealth bomber flew across the sky. Am I supposed to be used to this?! HERE?! The only time I ever saw an F-15 was when I visited the Intrepid or saw the Blue Angels put on a show for Independence Day.
Nevertheless, we have been horribly attacked by a not-quite faceless enemy. That enemy has created a situation beyond precedent. We must not be guided by precedent in our response. We must change our reference points and get out of our own way. It is our definition of the unthinkable they count on as a constraint.
Terrorism is not a hedge to be trimmed, a cancer to be removed, or a force we can build a shield against. It is not a poke in the eye, an act to be repaid, or a legal drama played out within some shared space of justice. Terrorism is a deeply insidious mindset whose very environment must be eliminated.
We are creative pragmatists, often criticized for wanting to play only games where we have made the rules. It is how we win, it is how we endure. In framing our response, let us be guided this—and ask but one question (and this thought is what scares me the most): What, for both the long and short term, is appallingly unthinkable to suicidal religious extremists and their supporters? Nothing, I'm afraid, is your answer, as was mine. But as I listen to people around me talk, I realized the anger and fear the people of New York and the U.S. is not only with regard to Americans, but for innocents civilians in other countries.
It should need not be said, but I will say it: The acts of terrorism that killed civilians in New York and Washington were reprehensible and indefensible; to try to defend them would be to abandon one’s humanity. No matter what the motivation of the attackers, the method is beyond discussion. As I monitored television during the day, the talk of retaliation was in the air; in the voices of some of the national-security “experts”, there was a hunger for retaliation. Even the journalists couldn’t resist; speculating on a military strike that might come, Peter Jennings of ABC News said that “the response is going to have to be massive” if it is to be effective.
Let us not forget that a “massive response” will kill people, and if the pattern of past U.S. actions holds, it will kill innocents. Innocent people, just like the ones in the towers in New York and the ones on the airplanes that were hijacked. To borrow from President Bush, “mother and fathers, friends and neighbors” will surely die in a massive response.
If we are truly going to claim to be decent people, our tears must flow not only for those of our own country. People are people, and grief that is limited to those within a specific political boundary denies the humanity of others. And if we are to be decent people, we all must demand of our government—the government that a great man of peace, Martin Luther King Jr., once described as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”—that the insanity stop here...
Sadly, even I have to agree, that is not possible, given the insanity of our enemies...who are, by definition, sociopaths, and insane themselves, since they have no sense of what is right or wrong. They are lacking a “conscience”, and that, my friends, is what scares me...
Guest Editorials and the opinions expressed therein are not necessarily the views and opinions of the Edgewater Beacon.
9/20/01
Past Editorials:
3/30/00: Of Midgets and Albinos
3/1/00: True Confessions of a Former Audubon Society Member
2/22/00: Edgewater, Now and Then
