Tuesday, September 11, 2001

America’s detachment comes to an end
Patience and prayers are necessary as government offices search for answers

By Jack Bullion
Skiff Staff

I remember being little and learning about history. And I couldn’t help but wonder, with a fearful mix of awe and jealousy, what life-altering events would occur during my adult lifetime.

I figured that, given the predictably unpredictable machinations of history, something monumental was bound to happen.

Our parents had the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, Watergate — any number of traumas in which to situate themselves in history.

And I wondered with a great deal of unease and anxiety just what portentous occurrences I and my generation would have to live through.

It was a strange thing for a little kid to be worrying about, but after the terrifying events in New York and Washington Tuesday, I can’t help but feel as if that worried little kid possessed a disheartening amount of prescience.

Perhaps a great deal of my childhood fascination with this was fixated upon how I would react in such a traumatic situation. And if I could somehow go back in time and talk to that little kid, I could say to him, truthfully, that I have absolutely no idea how to react.

I’ve been flabbergasted ever since I woke up this morning and turned on the radio to find that the usual morning show banter had been replaced by deadly serious news reporting that seemed to become more grave with each passing minute.

I dragged myself to campus only to find fellow students comforting their parents and friends on their cell phones and signs that read “Yes, class has been canceled.”

I have been on the phone with my parents back home in Missouri and with my sister at University of North Texas. I played my radio and my TV at the same time.

Even if I’d left only one on, it’d all still make very little sense.

New York and Washington are a long way from this campus, but the effects of the suffering and tragedy are no doubt felt by everyone here.

Skyscrapers, which once elicited feelings of grandeur and commercial excess within me, now just seem like helplessly gaudy targets.

This inexplicably horrifying act is made even more sickening when one considers the terrifying clockwork with which the attack was executed, and the extent to which it worked, certainly not flawlessly, but still with severe devastation.

It is even more sorrowful to consider that, somewhere, crowds were cheering as those two huge towers crumbled.

We live in a new world, where the parameters of war have become increasingly ill-defined.

Bereavement begets vengeance, and now much of the talk on television and radio has turned to theories about who could’ve done it and how they should be punished.

But how do you punish someone who, as has been proven without a doubt today, would willingly die for their cause anyway?

Questions outnumber answers. But as painful as it sounds, we need to be patient.

It’s all right to be sick, angry and sad. But our government, intelligence services and military are more than well-equipped to get to the bottom of this and probably have a much better idea of how to go about it than an irate radio station caller with a wild theory.

Right now, all we can and should do is concentrate our energy into hope and prayers for those affected by this disaster.

One last thing has become abundantly clear to me. As jaded and cynical as some of us can get about what we may perceive as outmoded American ideals (and I readily admit that I am guilty of this), we have to admit that we live in a pretty good country, where we have the freedom to do as we wish, to conduct our lives in a manner that pleases ourselves.

More than freedom, though, we have been provided with safety and security that have allowed us to cultivate a blissful, unassailable sense of detachment from the horror that occurs in the rest of the world.

This detachment, however, lies crumbled in a heap of rubble.

Jack Bullion is a senior English major from Columbia, Mo. He can be reached at (j.w.bullion@student.tcu.edu).