Daniel Shephard
Website author
World Summit on Sustainable Resources
United Nations
What I wondered, as I watched the black smoke from the World Trade Center sully what were otherwise clear blue skies, was how the fire would be put out. Before thoughts of who did it, before feelings of anger and desire for revenge entered my mind, all I wanted to know was how the fire would be put out. It wasn't as if the fires wouldn't be put out--I always assumed, as my number 7 train rumbled toward Manhattan, that they would be--it was just that I couldn't figure out how it would be done.
There had to be a plan. Sprinklers? High rise water cannons? Firefighting helicopters? I didn't know. Experts? Plan B? The city's emergency nerve center was in those buildings. There had to be a way.
From my viewpoint, some three miles northward, there was no doubt that the normally silver and shimmering buildings had already been damaged and blackened. Traffic in the city was already in knots, and if I had been able to read the situation properly, I would have turned around and gone home. But the idea that the buildings could fall was an idea beyond the scope of what I could possibly believe.
And as the train dipped into the tunnel that would take me under the East River to Manhattan, the buildings still stood.
The inconceivable, the unimaginable, did happen. Minutes later, while I was somewhere under the East River, the first of the towers fell. The other would fall soon after.
Even the collapse of these landmarks did not put out the fire, which continued to bum and smolder for months afterward.
We have buried our dead and honored our heroes since September. Our leaders say our country is strong and democracy will endure, and that good will triumph over evil. But we cannot deny the fact that our buildings were hit and our buildings fell. Evil, as we now call it, can happen here.
Months after the attacks, I am still surprised by my surprise that the buildings fell. I had always thought that once built, the buildings were forever. And the Pentagon, I thought, was not only impenetrable but protected by the most infallible defense systems ever devised.
A healthy sense of denial, it had always seemed, goes hand in hand with a strong sense of survival. Those perennial cassandras, naysayers, and doomsday experts have never appealed to me, as those apocalyptic visions are always wrong, outside of the Bible.
But the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center have exposed a thick layer of vulnerability, not necessarily to further attack, but to a sense that denial of any problem inevitably leads to an undesirable boomerang of effects.
It's a question of control, it seems, and on a personal level, we never seem to have any. Eating chocolate makes us fat, drinking makes us drunk, and smoking gives us cancer. We know, but we indulge anyway.
But we have another power, the power to believe things that we don't like are not there--we can make the homeless invisible and we can relegate poverty to the back burner. We can, and do, forget about these problems, until somehow they manifest themselves in new and more tangible forms, such as in crime, drugs, and disease.
The extraordinary unity sensed by Americans since the attacks has fortified us in the comfort that we are doing whatever it takes to go after the evil doers. Yet even as we work to take new steps to bolster the military to protect our collective peace and security, our actions as a nation are predicated on a denial of the problems faced by the rest of the world.
As unbelievable as is the idea that the World Trade Center towers could fall down, so too is the idea that this country still sees terrorism as some foreign contagion that can be sealed off at our borders. Turmoil is for other countries. Here, it is law and order, peace and security, and free markets for all.
But the towers did fall. There was no plan for putting out that kind of fire. And perhaps now, we can recognize that a plan for bolstering our defenses must rest on recognizing, understanding, and addressing the problems of the "bad" neighborhoods of the world.
Just as we choose not to see the poverty and violence that exist in our midst--until a particularly heinous crime hits too close to home--we choose not to dwell on the problems that occur elsewhere. We chose complete indifference to the war in Afghanistan for ten years, and we choose indifference to the civil conflicts in Africa right now. We, as a nation, choose not to concern ourselves with things like poverty, AIDS, or malaria, especially when they happen over there.
It is not that we are happy about the widespread poverty, the constant conflict and instability, and the seemingly growing fanaticism of alien religions or ideologies; they are simply things that are over there, and cannot disturb us as we go about our day-to-day living.
This head-in-the-sand approach to life has become the norm and we have returned to it. Never mind that the gas that powers our fleet of SUVs and minivans comes from places like the Middle East, Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Never mind that our toys come from China and our blue jeans come from El Salvador and Bangladesh. Never mind that our gold and diamonds come from Africa.
Even in a recession, even with the threat of terrorism, these are good times for Americans. We can get anything we want, whenever we want it, and use it however we like--without worrying about whether it bothers anyone else.
But we don't live in isolation. The "other world" always has a way of intruding. And still, our primal, and only response, is to bolster Fortress America. The problem is, this, by itself, does not provide peace and security in the long run.
There has been a war on drugs going on for as long as I can remember, yet it has always seemed that the problem comes from over there, and try as we may to win a military victory over the growers and suppliers, we have not won. A good part of the problem is that to a large degree, the problem is one of our making--it is our population that demands and consumes the drugs.
Successful efforts to combat crime have generally consisted of a significant element of community involvement. Where this has been missing, and where discrimination is rampant, the result is often riots and civil unrest.
The war on terrorism will not be won by the military alone. It cannot be won with take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums and rhetoric about good versus evil. Rather, it can only be won by engaging the rest of the world and by demonstrating to other peoples that we are on their side and that we will help solve their problems.
It is not that there are no bad people or crazies out there. And poverty and despair by themselves do not create terrorists--the September 11th hijackers were hardly members of an underclass. But given the right conditions--a bleak, hopeless outlook, combined with our refusal to see the world as it really is--these criminals and terrorists will have their day.
As I walked homeward across the Queensborough Bridge on that day, along with a stream of other similarly placed refugees, we all shared the same thought: would the bridge fall? With the subways halted, cars banned, and buses stopped, it was as if we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The fear of another attack has abated but has not passed. The military reserves who now check the entrances to tunnels and bridges and who patrol airports and railroad terminals still provide little consolation, as we stand on guard knowing full well that the threat to our safety and security will continue for as long as we refuse to acknowledge the full nature of the problem.