A top the Capitol West steps I'm looking at the Mall and the Washington Monument. This place is dead.
The measured bang of a hammer across the mall is the only sound. The heart of D.C. is otherwise silent. It's not a peaceful calm; it's a spooky calm, a something-is-incredibly-wrong calm, a tranquility that is far from being meditative and is unsettling to the soul. This is just what we can't let happen to us as a nation; we can't let this event strip away our humanity.
The attacks Tuesday were not aimed at human lives, even though they wiped out so many. They were not aimed at our persons or our infrastructure or our capital endowments. They were aimed at our soul as a nation. The targets, symbols of American pride, were not even chosen because of the number of people they house as workers, though that did magnify the horror of it all.
If it were just about taking lives, the perpetrators could have accomplished this in a less showy but more destructive manner, without orchestrating the hijacking of four commercial aircraft. The perpetrators' missiles were not aimed at buildings or people or cities. They were aimed at our hearts and at diminishing our humanity. If D.C. remains the way it is today - dead - the first day of the aftermath, the evil people behind this tragedy will have won and we will have handed them the victory.
Grief and solemnity are appropriate reactions to any tragedy and certainly to one of this magnitude. But because this attack is more than an attack on our loved ones, because it is mostly an assault on the living and our spirits and our completeness as human beings, we are obliged to overcome. Not to forget, but to live life, free of fear and to its fullest. To shut down our lives, to have our cities silent as opposed to bustling and replete with life and spirit, is to fall victim to the greatest crime: the denial of human dignity.
Today, I stepped onto Independence Avenue and walked up and down it. There were no cars and there were no people to drive any cars. Prior to today, if I cared a wit for my life, I would not have dared to put my toe on the edge of the street or a mad stampede of traffic would have flattened me. There were no cars, no noises, no traffic.
Everything has changed.
Everything.
Nothing will ever be the same. Little things - from showing up an hour early for a flight to taking casual tours of federal buildings to being presumed innocent until suspicion gives you reason to think otherwise - will evaporate and probably never be restored. But if justice is to be realized, some things must be repaired. Among them are our faith in human dignity, our souls that these terrorists hoped to hijack from us, and our sense of security in our homes and neighborhoods.
My head is locked in a stare at the cavity which pierces the Pentagon. It is as though a charred chunk of the building has been carved from itself. The aircraft is nowhere to be seen and the Pentagon itself is taped off. The press is congregating at a dinky gas station that has a view overlooking the damage. The pilot was so skilled he did not clip any of the lamps or wires that surround the building, based on a quick sizing up of the scene. The air reeks of char and smoke that has been percolating, but at last abating in intensity. It is shocking. It is amazing. It is historic. It is surreal.
But it is not the crime scene.
The crime occurs when what these terrorists have raped our hearts and our souls and our minds of sanity. When we become paranoid and don't fly and when we don't try to function as human beings with a full range of emotions - not just melancholy - then the violence will have at last become terrorism because it accomplishes precisely what terrorism aims to do - to terrorize.
Things cannot be put right by way of a traditional war - or even an unconventional war, either. We don't have a visible enemy to fight. We have a criminal and his henchmen to apprehend. The real war is fought within us, and although terrorists leave us powerless to combat their physical attacks, they ultimately are powerless to achieve their goals if we obstinately fight to preserve our humanity. This is a conflict internal to all of us.
Let's win this war. The next time I return to Washington - or, for that matter, to Charlottesville - I want to be able to call it alive.
Jeffrey Eisenberg is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at jeisenberg@cavalierdaily.com.
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