Taking It Personally
What do we do with all this anger
Edward Gilbreath | posted 9/01/2001 12:00AM
The planes are flying again. Even as I write this, I can hear the turbine rumble of a commercial jet soaring over my Chicago suburb. Slowly things are getting back to normal. But we all know they will never be normal in quite the same way. The very nature of "normal" has changed in America. The normal procedure for checking in at the airport now promises to be a lot more complicated. The normal routine of kissing your spouse and children goodbye in the morning suddenly becomes more necessary. The normal New York City skyline now has a hole in its heart.
And so do we.
As the dual towers fell, our collective soul collapsed with them. As one-fifth of the Pentagon burned, so did our rage. We had never seen anything like it before, not in real life anyway. Our voyeuristic captivation with the TV images gradually gave way to the awful realization that, unlike the computerized effects in a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick, those buildings and airplanes held living people—living people whose last moments were recorded before our very eyes.
Then we witnessed the footage of Middle Eastern exultation. We saw men and women cheering and praising Allah for our misfortune. We saw the Associated Press photo of the young Palestinian boy, dressed in a Spider-Man T-shirt, firing a rifle into the air in anti-American celebration. We saw the enemy, and they were Muslim.
The Days After
In the wake of America's darkest morning, we are a closer nation. People are smiling at each other more this week. Commuters seem nicer on the roads. Busy folks seem more intentional about making eye contact. Across the country, people are lining up in droves to donate blood. Stores are selling out of American flags. Young men—and women—are flocking to local military recruiting offices, prepared to enlist. Once again, a national tragedy has stirred our courage and compassion.
In this atmosphere, issues like reparations for slavery—a hot topic just a week earlier—are suddenly forgotten. In fact, our traditional areas of cultural antagonism—black vs. white, Democrat vs. Republican, prolife vs. prochoice—seem a million debates away. Right now we are simply Americans: one nation, under God, indivisible.
But are we really? Amid the rush of patriotism and solidarity, there is also ugliness. In cities big and small across the U.S., a constant stream of disturbing reports has revealed a sturdy anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment rising from frustrated—and usually white—Americans. There have been death threats phoned and e-mailed to local mosques. In Washington, D.C., two bricks were thrown through the window of an Islamic bookstore; one brick was wrapped with a note: "Death to Arab Murderers." Worshipers at a Brooklyn mosque were rattled from their prayer time by a man outside shouting, "Murderers." In Chicago, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a Muslim school in the early-morning hours; a noisy group of young adults marched in front of a mosque yelling anti-Arab insults; a gas-station attendant of Moroccan descent was assaulted by a raving hothead with a machete. In this hostile climate, all you have to do is look the part to be targeted.
On one Chicago talk-radio show, a gentle-sounding female caller poignantly shared her sadness over the events of the week before digressing into a xenophobic rant. "We need to take a serious look at revoking visas and cutting off any further immigration into our country," she said.
Though the media have been quick to include calls for tolerance and level-headedness in their coverage of the terrorist attacks, some have actually helped to fuel the smoldering outrage. The San Francisco Examiner, for instance, printed the headline "BASTARDS!" across its Wednesday-morning edition. The editor claimed that it was an attempt to get at the visceral emotion so many Americans were feeling, and the paper definitely grabbed readers' attention. But such calculated sensationalism inevitably shifts people's moods away from healthy moral indignation to the more vicious variety. Indeed, it will encourage some people to seek out a concrete target for their ire.
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