A lover's colors, could you see her sprite on virgin memory. If time passes or no, the rift between a week ago and now is limitless. And if the world adopts a phase of ordinary, it is only because you've forgotten it. You'd expect the terror if it weren't for that.
Sometime between viewing the gallery of pictures Nancyk so kindly linked and running in tertiary parallel from the devouring sky yesterday, I began to watch myself become overwhelmed by the terror growing in me. Even to articulate it to myself helped. But it helped more finally to embrace a friend and say it, "I am terrified."
Terrorism has never been a part of my experience before. In some categories of experience, human nature may follow the rule of the inverse cube, and it was always far away. There may be a general, if not mathematically precise, correlation between psychic states and volumetrics. At any rate, terrorism was a newsprint phenomenon. Of the many things ended last week, not least among them is that innocence.
It is important to bear the methods of terror in mind.
In the first place, during the critical phase of the attack-seizing control-hope of survival must be extended. Without it, the cooperation of the victim is less to be counted on. Witness the actions of the passengers of the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
In the second, terror turns the resources of the opponent against the opponent. Not just its airplanes and buildings, but its people. As impressive the display of the terrorists tactics and drama of his self-destruction, he is intrinsically too weak to destroy his opponent directly. He relies on his opponent to destroy himself.
Because terror is so heavily thematized as a media phenomenon, we are dissociative in encountering it. The experiential terror which terror[ism] engenders is, in the context of its broadcast, something generalized to the population at large. Its personal impact is somewhat vague. But that is because the specific danger we encounter 'in print' is not immanent-whether the actual terror event was physically near to hand or not, it is 'volumentrically' remote.
BUT TO BE EFFECTIVE, TERROR MUST BE HIGHLY PERSONAL. If the terrorist seeks to destroy the culture he does this by aiming for the individual. Witness the passengers being forced to call their loved ones to bid them farewell. Witness any cognizant person in this city.
Because the terrorist is intent producing terror in the individual, it is incumbent on the individual to rise above that terror. If there is a moral imperative, this is it. For one's own sake, for the sake of one's community, one's culture, one's declaration of commonness with humankind. That is, it is imperative for the sake of the good.
All of us living here have been shattered by the attack last week. You wish an end to grieving, but none is in sight. But there are likely many of us who recognize that not only was fortress America breached on the 11th, but so was the old volumentrics of terror. In principle, the attack of September 11 was as near to any one-and, therefore, to any member of the AWAD community, as it was to us.
I recognized, yesterday, in the very moment of my conviction that I would within days be incinerated in a nuclear flash, terror possessing me.
In the case of this particular possession, the terror was grounded on something more than illusion. The situation facing us is perhaps the most dangerous in history.
But it was still terror. And in ceding to it, I cede to my mortal opponent.
I will not yield.
I count no one out of humanity. Not even last week's murderers. For in doing so, I yield to division-And that is what the terrorist wanted. Badly enough to die for.
In exchange, a thing is evaluated by the good for which it is traded. For my destruction, the terrorist was willing to pay his life.
He wants me to fear. But he is really telling me, "see how precious your life is, that I would sacrifice mine to destroy it." That is his gift to me.
Each of us must look into their heart and examine for themselves what the crisis brings there. And if it is destruction, you can tell it first by the way it divides you from friends.
And we are friends.
I pray we disagree. That is the substance of discourse. And that in discourse, we nourish the unity of our friendship.
Kol HaOlam, Kooloh, Gesher Tsar Meod. V'Haichar: lo lefached klal
--All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear. Not to fear at all.
Or, as someone else once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
I love you all. For who you are, and for your humanity.
These are very hard times, and we will live through them and survive.
IP
