81 Dread

Unlike most of the students, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends I spoke with or emailed over the next twelve months, I felt no anger. My own reactions to the events were—in this order—shock, disbelief, horror, revulsion, sorrow, sadness, and dread. What next—

At first more than anything else I felt sad.

Then I felt dread.

For the next two months and off and on for several weeks more, to colleagues, friends, and family I emailed all the poems and short excerpts of prose I could think of that might offer comfort and context for understanding.

"I think we should drop nuclear bombs on Mecca," proposed a man in one of my classes not long after the religion of the suspected perpetrators was first reported, "and incinerate every single one of them towel heads and turn their whole fucking country into one big concrete parking lot."

Retaliation.

My student insisted he wasn't joking.

"Yes, you are," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"You are," I said.

"I'm not!"

Oof—

The carpet bombing of Afghanistan began.

As I stood at the sink and washed dishes at Christmas I asked one of our holiday dinner guests if he knew how many innocent Afghans had been killed in the war there. The media had studiously avoided reporting any estimate. I was curious. My question annoyed my guest.

He made a face.

"I don't give a damn how many innocent Afghans have been killed!" he exclaimed.

The victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11 and the victims of our retaliation in Afghanistan were all total strangers to him. He knew none of them. Yet the thought of innocent American victims brought him to the verge of tears. His eyes glistened as we spoke. Their lives were precious. The death of innocent Afghans meant nothing to him. Their lives were worthless. He had only his labels to help him think and feel.

American—

Precious.

Afghan—

Worthless.

In my classes I tried everything I could think of to defuse the anger of my students. One of my email correspondents was a demographer, I told them, who claimed to bear allegiance to no national state nor to any organized religion. She tried to see our species and our planet as a whole.

One.

"She calls herself an earthling and a freethinker," I explained.

Liberal.

Fearing possible recrimination from patriots and true believers of a wide range of nations and churches, she asked that I withhold her name and email address if I were to share her remarks with others. Despite recent events she remained optimistic. Even if every American should die in a terrorist attack, from anthrax, say, or from radiation, on the great graph of historical time the death of 300 million people was a significant but still relatively minor blip; and 94 percent of the human race, about 6.2 billion people, would remain alive.

For purposes of comparison my friend the demographer asked that we consider the effect of the bubonic plague on 14th-century Europe. Within ten years the disease had killed 25 million people, fully one third of the European population, yet just a short while later, in historical time, there had occurred the justly celebrated Renaissance. Life went on.

Though her numbers were right, my demographer was a fiction of my own invention who allowed me to present both information and an attitude and perspective I wanted my students to consider without blaming me.

The moderator.