Waking to the World's Pain
by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Two weeks have passed since I awoke to the words "explosion" and "Manhattan" on my alarm radio. It was a fall day in Tucson, the summer's heat beginning to subside so that the delicious sensation of coolness was new and palpable. I am accustomed to waking to the news, a sorrowful brew of tragedy and conflict, nearly always taking place somewhere else on the globe so that grief and fear have been remote. But with those words came the escalating series of images: smoke billowing from a skyscraper, a passenger jet aiming toward the tower's mate, bodies scrambling to the windows, men in suits falling like weighted rags having chosen a death gentler than the horror ignited within glass and steel walls, one building collapsing, and then the other, and then the human face of anguish, the human face of grief. Never have I seen so many men expressing their anguish in public - fireman, journalist, comedian, mayor and cop - all wounded into expressing an anguish that cut to the soul. Grief and fear came home to everyone that morning. Everyone knew the hard truth: It could have been me. It could have been my lover. My daughter. My grandsons.

My own grief - a woman's grief, a poet's grief - is not an unfamiliar visitor to my life. The loss of a lover, the death of a parent, the impotence of being misrepresented or misunderstood can send me spinning under the breakers of that emotion. I don't welcome or invite such visits, but I appreciate their value as a measure of my love, whether it be for a person or for an ideal such as truth or justice. And so, like so many others I have embraced this collective grief, been addicted to the television images, to the stories that make real each singular tragedy, each expression of heroic resolve in meeting it. I have wanted its reality to penetrate my being so that I will never again toss off other people's misery as too remote to merit my compassion, sighing in relief that such things are dreadful, yes, but at least we are safe from them here.

I have wanted to understand the perpetrators, how the world looks from inside their passion - the arts of collaboration and sacrifice refined to gem-clear precision. For what would I compromise my belief that no one has the right to take the life of another? Put a weapon in my hand, put an adversary at the neck of my daughter, and I would kill with passionate conviction. When I tell my daughter this, she says, If someone attacked my boys, I'd kill them with my bare hands. Both of us finding it not inconsistent that we can be feminists, artists, pacifists, opponents to capital punishment, and fierce to protect what we love.

But those imagined maternal scenarios are not analogous to our situation after the brutal crimes inflicted on September 11, 2001. For one thing, the terrorists do believe they have the right, even the God-given duty, to kill those who hold beliefs that differ from theirs. For another thing, we don't face the crisis as enraged individuals confronted with an obvious enemy. We are wounded and confused as a collective being. The enemy is here, there, everywhere, and nowhere. Somehow we must convince the ideologues of hatred that we are not a satanic people. And do not mistake that the nineteen men who gave their lives to inflict this wound hated every one of us - Catholic and atheist, girl scout and weapons dealer, movie mogul and janitor, CEO and anti-globalization activist. It made no difference to them which ones of us they killed. We have always been united in our freedom to disagree, though we have not always appreciated that freedom. Now we are united in grief and vulnerability. Not the least of our grief is the awareness that we have met an opponent against whom our prayers for peace will be only one of the weapons employed.

Wendell Berry | Alison Deming | William Kittredge
Richard Nelson | David W. Orr | Chet Raymo | Pattiann Rogers
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