I COULDN'T wish my cousin a happy birthday. He's two days older than I am, and we'd had the "What do you want for your birthday?" conversation during the weekend. I sent him a copy of "Dogma" by next-day mail. I forgot to ask if he'd gotten it, because when I talked to him on Tuesday, all I wanted to know was that he was OK. And I couldn't say, "Happy birthday," because there was no way for him to be having one. He spent his 20th birthday in his dorm at Columbia University, watching on TV what was happening a few blocks away. On the streets of New York City, people cried and choked on the dust and yelled, "We gotta bomb 'em."
My parents had picked this week, of all weeks, to fly from Texas to Washington, D.C. for a conference. That fact didn't come to mind immediately. As I listened to NPR Tuesday morning, I felt the same kind of generalized grief that came with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The news media attempted to apprise me of the full extent of the disaster, and I responded appropriately, I suppose.
Yet at first, only my head and heart ached. This was terrible, but the real horror could be known only by those directly affected: the passengers of the planes, the people in the buildings and on the ground, and their families and friends. I didn't get the genuine kick-in-the-stomach until I remembered that my parents were visiting D.C. and I didn't know if they were coming Tuesday or Wednesday.
At that moment, the crashes and bombs metamorphosed from a loud, important noise into an intimate clamor. Sadness and happiness draw power from proximity. Before thinking of the possibility that my parents were on the plane that hit the Pentagon, I was just a spectator. I'd never visited the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, and I didn't know anyone who worked in them. Fear for my family pulled the tragedy off the news and into myself.
I managed to get word of my parents' safety, and pass it along to my sisters. "Why did they have to be in D.C. today?" we asked each other. For the first time, I was grateful that we lived in a sleepy little town that no one would ever bomb for the simple reason that they would hit more cows than people. And for the first time, I recognized the subsiding terror for Mom and Dad's safety as something with which they dealt much more often, every time we were late or missing or not returning calls. For them, the world was perpetually ready to mount an attack.
The e-mails started coming in: blood drives, vigils, offers of support from both friends and institutions. In class people kept their cell phones on and did their best to participate normally. One girl's phone went off, with good news: Her boyfriend's brother had been two blocks away from the towers, but he was unhurt. Some extracurricular activities were postponed, while others stayed on schedule with the determination to give people the option of stepping away from the ongoing coverage of calamity.
The entire day held a balance between keeping what had happened, and to whom it had happened, in mind while acknowledging that life had to go on. We hadn't been hit, and we perhaps had a responsibility to maintain the routine of our work and play, because disruption would serve the purposes of the bombers and hijackers, not the victims.
My gut-clenching anxiety for my family and friends had subsided with the phone calls, e-mails and Internet messaging. I knew Mom would have information about any coworker's-uncle's-sister-in-law's son who had been affected, but my sensitivity couldn't go that far. Now my main worry, besides the specter of further attacks, was over America's reaction.
I shut off the radio voices because they sounded angry and spouted words of vengeance. I couldn't handle rage just yet; grief deserved its turn before being pushed aside for a more "productive" emotion. More frightening than any government exploit, however, were the actions of individuals. As with terrorism, the volatility of and lack of accountability for these actions made them loom larger in my mind than the predictable, policy-driven deeds of institutions did.
I felt unsure about the safety of the Arab-American community. I remembered the reaction to Oklahoma City before we knew that a home-grown murderer was to blame, and the threat of reprisals to innocent people who happened to look like Osama bin Laden. History haunted me with the memory of Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor, especially with every other news commentator comparing Tuesday's catastrophes with that bombing. We couldn't do that again. We'd apologized and recognized it was wrong, and we knew very well that Arab-Americans were not the enemy within.
The goal for now is to remain a society held together by common concern for one another as individuals, not split by anger between members of different groups. At the end of the day, Americans can beat back and survive external damage, but we cannot withstand being split from within.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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