Small Wonder (19 page)

C
olumbine used to be one of my favorite flowers,” my friend told me, and we both fell silent. We'd been talking about what she might plant on the steep bank at the foot of the woods above her house, but a single word cut us suddenly adrift from our focus on the uncomplicated life in which flowers could matter. I understood why she no longer had the heart to plant columbines. I feel that way, too, and at the same time I feel we ought to plant them everywhere, to make sure we remember. In our backyards, on the graves of the children lost, even on the graves of the children who murdered, whose par
ents must surely live with the deepest emotional pain it is possible to bear.

In the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, the whole country experienced grief and shock and—very noticeably—the spectacle of a nation acting bewildered. Even the op-ed commentators who usually tell us just what to think were asking, instead, what we should think. How could this happen in an ordinary school, an ordinary neighborhood? Why would any student, however frustrated with meanspirited tormentors, believe that guns and bombs were the answer?

I'm inclined to think all of us who are really interested in these questions might have started asking them a long while ago. Why does any person or nation, including ours, persist in celebrating violence as an honorable expression of disapproval? In, let's say, Iraq, the Sudan, Waco—anywhere we get fed up with meanspirited tormentors—why are we so quick to assume that guns and bombs are the answer?

Some accidents and tragedies and bizarre twists of fate are truly senseless, as random as lightning bolts out of the blue. But this one at Columbine High was not, and to say it was is irresponsible. “Senseless” sounds like “without cause,” and it requires no action, so that after an appropriate interval of dismayed hand-wringing, we can go back to business as usual. What takes guts is to own up: This event made sense. Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men—from presidents to the coolest film characters—solve problems by killing people. Killing is quick and sure and altogether manly.

It is utterly predictable that some boys who are desperate for admiration and influence will reach for guns and bombs. And it's not surprising that this happened in a middle-class neighborhood; institutional violence is right at home in the suburbs. Don't let's point too hard at the gangsta rap in our brother's house until
we've examined the video games, movies, and political choices we support in our own. The tragedy in Littleton grew out of a culture that is loudly and proudly rooting for the global shootout. That culture is us.

Conventional wisdom tells us that Nazis, the U.S. Marines, the Terminator, and the NYPD. all kill for different reasons. But as every parent knows, children are good at ignoring or seeing straight through the subtleties we spin. Here's what they must surely see: Killing is an exalted tool for punishment and control. Americans who won't support it are ridiculed, shamed, or even threatened. The Vietnam war was a morally equivocal conflict by any historical measure, and yet to this day, candidates for public office who avoided being drafted into that war are widely held to be unfit for leadership.

Most Americans believe bloodshed is necessary for preserving our way of life, even though it means risking the occasional misfire—the civilians strafed because they happened to live too close to the terrorist, maybe, or the factory that actually made medicines but
might
have been making weapons. We're willing to sacrifice the innocent man condemned to death row because every crime must be paid for, and no jury is perfect. The majority position in our country seems to be that violence is an appropriate means to power, and that the loss of certain innocents along the way is the sad but inevitable cost.

I'd like to ask those who favor this position if they would be willing to go to Littleton and explain to some mothers what constitutes an acceptable risk. Really. Because in a society that embraces violence, this is what “our way of life” has come to mean. The question can't be
why
but only “Why yours and not mine?” We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die. But we easily forget a crucial component
of this formula: “Bad” is defined by the aggressor. Any of our children may someday be, in someone's mind, the bad guy.

For all of us who are clamoring for meaning, aching for the loss of these precious young lives in Littleton to mean something, my strongest instinct is to use the event to nail a permanent benchmark into our hearts: Life is that precious, period. It is possible to establish zero tolerance for murder as a solution to anything. Those of us who agree to this contract can start by removing from our households and lives every television program, video game, film, book, toy, and CD that presents the killing of humans (however symbolic) as an entertainment option, rather than the appalling loss it really is. Then we can move on to harder choices, such as discussing the moral lessons of capital punishment. Demanding from our elected officials the subtleties and intelligence of diplomacy instead of an endless war budget. Looking into what we did (and are still doing) to the living souls of Iraq, if we can bear it. And—this is important—telling our kids we aren't necessarily proud of the parts of our history that involved bombing people in countries whose policies we didn't agree with.

Sounds extreme? Let's be honest.
Death
is extreme, and the children are paying attention.

I
've traveled in airplanes so often, I have frequent-flyer miles enough to go to China.

I never watch movies that feature violent, spectacular horrors, so my uncalloused psyche was laid wide open to the images, when they came, of real airplanes slamming into real buildings.

And I have an overgrown, acutely visual imagination. It's the combination of these vulnerabilities, I suppose, that nearly debilitated me for many days with my own particular visions of what hundreds of people must have gone through—but did not live through—on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

In the weeks following that monstrous massacre I walked through the motions of a normal life, like everyone else who was lucky enough to have a “normal” to get back to, rather than an aching hole where a loved one used to be. In literal terms I was untouched; my home is thousands of miles from any site where an airplane crashed that day. But I have many friends who are much closer to the catastrophe: one who often works near the Pentagon; another who was passing through Washington Square on his way to work in lower Manhattan when his eyes went up to the tallest building as it began, incomprehensibly, to fall down. He likened the sound that rose from the bystanders to “a packed stadium filled with keening.” One of the people dearest to me on earth was on a plane that took off from Newark, I was certain, at the same hour and minute as two of the fatal flights. For the first time in my life, my calls to that city that never sleeps were answered with a dead line. I was worried sick about my far-flung friends for the hours and days it took until I could talk with each one in turn, reassuring myself that my community remained more or less as it had been. I have two close friends who lost people they loved, so I stand one degree separated from a tragedy that directly bereaved so many in one horrendous blow.

Only my soul was scathed. My mind's eye kept watching this movie in my head: seeing the blue stars that invade my vision in times of panic; breathing too fast, gripping the hand of a stranger in the seat beside me; thinking in frantic minutes about the years my girls will have to get through without me. Wishing I
had
after all, despite my grudge against the things, bought a cell phone. Brutal murder with knives; desperation; watching the end of the world from an aisle seat.

So many people. They crowded my consciousness with a silent cry for memorial. I woke from dreams of facing the end beside them, and in those first confused seconds while I struggled to
identify the impalpable burden that weighed on my heart I would see it again, not as dream but as reality. Throughout my day I would find myself gripped by distraction, looking out the window at the haze on the mountains as the scene played in front of me again and again. Only a few days before September 11, I had needed to undertake the new (for me) experiences of general anesthesia and surgery. And so the acute pain, foggy-headedness, and disturbed sleep of my slow recuperation became confused and intermingled for me with the pain and recuperative trauma of my nation in a slow, hallucinatory grief.

Then a death in our own family followed upon all those others by just three days, a further devastation, and we faced the difficulties of trying to get to my father-in-law's funeral in a distant city. The airways reopened, but a timely arrival was by no means guaranteed. I wasn't yet well enough to travel, so I stayed home with the children while Steven made the trip alone. As he left, I wept again from my bottomless well of grief, feeling sure the world was ending—feeling sure that my husband's airplane would also fall out of the sky, and I would not see him again.

“It's probably safer to fly right now,” he told me reasonably, “than at any time in the last ten years.”

“I know that,” I said, “but I don't
feel
that.”

This is what changed for us that day: not what we know, but how we feel. We have always lived in a world of constant sorrow and calamity, but most of us have never had to say before, It could have been me. My daughters and me on that plane, my husband in that building. I have stepped on that very pavement, I have probably sat on one of those planes. This was
us
, Americans at work, on vacation, going home, or just walking from one building to another. Alive, then dead.

It's probably only human to admit that a stranger's death is more shattering when we can imagine it as our own. We all began to say, that week, “This is the worst thing that has ever hap
pened.”
To us,
I know we should have added, for worse disasters have happened—if “worse” can be measured solely by the number of dead—in practically every other country on earth. Two years earlier an earthquake in Turkey had killed three times as many people in one day, babies and mothers and businessmen. The November before that, a hurricane had hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines; even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Some disasters are termed “natural” (though it was war that left Nicaragua so vulnerable), and yet their victims are just as innocent as ours on September 11, and equally dead. Which end of the world should we talk about? Only the murderous kind? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed U.S. Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work and schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone had ever thought possible: seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine, now that we can—now that we have a number with which to compare it—
seventy thousand people dead in one minute
. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.

There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down—hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside—and here in the place I want to love best, I watched people cheer about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and used the word
evil
. We all tend to raise up our compatriots' lives to a sacred level, thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less acceptably taken than lives on other soil. When many lives are lost all at once, people come together and speak words such as
heinous
and
honor
and
revenge
, presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day
around the world from sickness or hunger. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony because really, every life that ends is utterly its own event—even as in some way every life is the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had a chance to love the light that's gone, you miss it. You should; you have to. You bear this world and everything that's wrong with it by holding life still precious, every time, and starting over.

In my lifetime I have argued against genocide, joined campaigns for disaster aid, sent seeds to places of famine. I have mourned my fellow humans in every way I've known how. But never before have their specific deaths so persistently entered my dreams. This time it was
us,
leaving us trembling, leading my little daughter to ask quietly, “Will it happen to me, Mama?” I understood with the deepest sadness I've ever known that this was the wrong question to ask, and it always had been. It has
always
been happening to us—in Nicaragua, in the Sudan, in Hiroshima, that night in Baghdad—and now we finally know what it feels like. Now we may learn, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to an empty bed.

 

In the coming spring I will plant a long raft of Legion of Honor poppies, the same ones that bloom in the graveyards at Verdun, across the bottom of our hay field. I decided to do this early on, as my own cenotaph. Every summer when the poppies' scarlet heads rise up from the earth, I'll remember that grief is eternal and so is life.

So many people were taken from us all at once this year, such courage and grief and fury cry out silently through our still-beating hearts, asking our nation for the right memorial. How can we
build it, what material shall we choose? What will be the quality of its soul? I've seen the thousand paper cranes in the quiet monument to peace in Hiroshima; the dark slash in the earth whispering the names of those we lost in Vietnam; the endless orchard of white crosses in the poppy fields of Verdun. And I've studied how all these nations behaved in the aftermath of their losses. The most crucial memorial must surely be in what we carry forward.

It will probably always be hard to speak of September 11 without using the words
unthinkable, unbelievable
. And yet somehow we did and do believe it. From the first moment I understood what was happening to us that morning, I felt my bones going soft with the most awful recognition I've ever known, the aching perception that this had been working its way toward us for so long. I did not, and will never, believe that such a blow was deserved; no one
deserves
to be murdered, least of all those blameless people sitting down to their desks, carrying breakfast to diners in a restaurant, or setting off on vacation. What I do believe is that the losers of all wars are largely the innocent, and we are a nation at war—we have been for many lifetimes, reinforcing or inventing reigns of power that mollify some and terrify others in many lands, for many reasons. In the years since I became a taxpaying adult, my money has helped finance air assaults in Afghanistan, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Panama, the Sudan, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia—and those are just the ones I can name without getting up from my desk to search out the history books that will remind me of all the others. How could I—how could
anyone
—reasonably have expected that we could go about our merry lives here in War Headquarters without being touched by war? Whether or not we deem all these campaigns just, we can't possibly expect to wage war without living in wartime. Elsewhere on the planet, no one is banking on that program. War is not just some game played by the strong against, or on behalf of, the weak. Lethal germs, airliner bombs, nuclear sab
otage, suicide missions—these are the weapons of the fiercely resourceful warrior raging against the mighty. In my bones I understand that they are not just going to be aimed at others
every
time; at some point they will be coming toward me. Assigning blame on this score is about as useful as looking at a hurricane through a drinking straw. The vast injuries comprising this picture surely call for justice, but the word
justice
itself calls for a system of accounting that may not be up to the task, when so many wounds have been inflicted for different reasons over the course of centuries, all in the guise of retaliation. I feel intensely linked with those who died on September 11, not because of any particular culpability, and not because I can presume to take anyone's place in any story, but because their deaths forced me wide awake to the immensity of what is wrong. This story belongs to every one of us, as a price somehow exacted in blood and anger and conscience. I am linked to a chain of events that has wrought devastation.

In those first weeks I found myself not stunned by this truth but in some way lost, watching the end of the world on an airplane again and again. I needed to finish this out so the awful loop in my head might finally close. I needed to understand what the dead were asking of me. People often say funerals and memorials are for the living, not the dead, and maybe that is so. But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will. Thousands of people awakened on the morning of September 11 and hurried or lingered over coffee, saw children off to school, made plans, kissed spouses, and bent their shoulders to the good they hoped to make of a new day, without ever dreaming they would not see the sun set again. To transsubstantiate these unfinished lives into some honorable endeavor on behalf of what they might
have been—this is surely more necessary now than satisfying our own anger and cravings for safety.

I can only hope to know what is being asked of me if I can somehow get beyond a survivor's panic and anger, to fly through all this or above it to glimpse another point of view. Possibly this is what each of us needs in order to go forward, the answer to the hardest question: If it could have been me on that awful Tuesday—if it could still be me, and the ones closest to me, the next time—what memorial would I ask the world to build for our remembrance? What would I want to have written on stone? Not to complete some national agenda, but just for
us?