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First anniversary of Sept. 11th a day of grieving, hope
By Kathryn Spangler
Editorials Editor

I’m not ready.

Those are the words that come to mind when I think about the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11. I realize that by the time this edition of the Old Gold and Black goes to press that day will have come and gone, but as I sit here writing this column on Sept. 10 with my hands shaking and my stomach twisted in knots of anxiety, all I can do is dread its arrival.

Last year on Sept. 11 I had woken up early so I could arrive at the pool in Reynolds Gymnasium just in time for the "early bird" lap swimming. I can remember the stillness of campus as I walked across the Quad from my room in Taylor House to the pool.

The stillness of that early September morning, accented by the blanket of dew on the Quad, the sunrise casting shadows on the sidewalks and utter silence save for the occasional flock of birds flying overhead, would have belied the idea that a few hours later I would be watching footage of a plane flying into the World Trade Center as I ate my cereal.

So, what did most of us do after we clicked on our TV during breakfast and saw a smoldering hole where a wall of the Pentagon used to be? We called our mothers, of course.

I, however, wound up hanging up the phone feeling worse than I had before I dialed her number — the insufferable political junkie in me was ready to talk foreign policy, pacifism and racial profiling even before anyone on CNN had uttered the words "Osama bin Laden" or "Afghanistan," and my mother wasn’t going to be an eager participant in any debate.

Rational thought and grief tend to mix like oil and water, of course. My mother knew she wasn’t ready to do anything but grieve; I wanted to stave grief off in prototypical college student/amateur journalist fashion by pretending it was just another story, just another set of facts to study and analyze.

These days Sept. 11 is the pebble in my shoe; it’s something I think about daily because it’s always there, tucked away in some corner of my brain. Sometimes I catch myself clenching my jaw in anger, sometimes I feel sick with grief and sometimes I play the part of the good student of international affairs, engaging in the impossible task of quantifying and analyzing religious extremism, sickening violence and cries for vengeance dressed up in absurd euphamisms like "decisive action," "a proportional response" and the "War on Terrorism" (of course, one man’s righteous, noble, justified war is always another man’s evil act of terrorism and vice versa).

I am reminded of a column written last year by Jordan Wagner, a graduate of the Class of 2002 ("The fallacy of the anti-war movement," Nov. 15, 2001). In his column, Wagner effectively crucified me for a column that I had written the week before ("America must end this war, defend human, civil rights," Nov. 8, 2001).

One particular passage burned itself onto my brain: "(The first argument by members of the anti-war movement) posits that we should have not gone to war because we are killing innocent civilians. That is a real bold proclamation if I ever heard one: killing civilians is bad. I do not really see many people protesting against that one. This is a war, and in war people die. It is a harsh reality that they must get used to."

The criticism stung, but eventually I realized that his arguments, however strongly he and many others may have believed in them or however persuasively they were written, remain, for lack of a better word, wrong. Wagner is demanding the impossible — for us to "get used to" governments sanctioning the deaths of civilians. The casualties of war are not a harsh reality we must get used to; when we accept the deaths of innocents as necessity, we have lost a part of our humanity. I wonder how any of us would react if we were told that the deaths of our friends or family members were "a harsh reality" that we needed "to get used to."

I wonder whose deaths would be acceptable to Wagner simply because they occurred within the context of a "war" somebody declared, or because some distant government official decided that the lives of somebody’s loved ones were dispensable.

I am also troubled by the fact I can surf over to The New York Times Web site and see photographs of each person who died in the World Trade Center, read their names and learn about their families while I am asked to pretend that the lives of hundreds of Afghan victims of the ironically named War on Terrorism aren’t worth enough for me to even read their names in the newspaper when they die.

"American," "Afghan" — these are useless, empty labels; why should I care more for a person who, by an accident of birth, happened to bear one label rather than the other?

Previously the writer in me had hoped that one year after Sept. 11, I would be able to construct some glowing feat of journalism mastery that would once and for all encompass the significance of Sept. 11 and quantify the effects of our subsequent military aggresion in Afghanistan (and in approximately 1000 words, no less — must have been the very ambitious writer in me talking).

Instead, I offer the self-indulgent words of a college student who has never wanted for anything material, will never be asked to carry a weapon and go fight those deemed her "enemy," hasn’t lost a friend or family member in a brutal act of terrorism, doesn’t know anyone forever disfigured by a land mine, hasn’t spent a single freezing night huddled under a thin blanket in a refugee camp, has never gone hungry out of necessity and probably will never attend a funeral for a loved one where the casket is empty because the body was forever lost in an insurmountable pile of singed rubble and ash.

Bombs only explode on CNN for this girl, not in local restaurants or on city buses.

But, even I can hope to inspire a little compassion among my readers. When I grieve tomorrow, it will be for everyone who has been affected by Sept. 11, and I will hope that the next time someone tries to sell any of us the theory of "collateral damage" or bogus U.S. foreign policy, we will think of the potential victims not as a nameless, faceless mass, but as individual people — and that perhaps someday the world’s leaders will see things from this point of view as well.

Editorials Editor Kathryn Spangler is a junior who plans to major in history.