Our Duty as Civilians

For hours on Tuesday, as we sat before our television sets and radios, we were a nation shocked, disbelieving, horrified and furiously angry, until finally the darkness of a deathly black night draped its restless silence over our wounded America. We have awakened a nation of mourners, anxious to learn the fates of our loved ones, and grieving for those we have lost. We have awakened with the consciousness that a ghastly nightmare has become our reality, and our hearts and souls ache bitterly. And so today, in spite of our pain, we ask how we must respond to the violence that has shaken our nation.

Our memory of the destruction we witnessed Tuesday will consist, in part, of the astonishing newsreel that captured the collision with the southern tower. The millions of Americans who watched those few seconds of videotape played over and over again, in slow motion, will long remember the sight of that dark shadow speeding toward the tower, disappearing as it collided, then emerging as a giant fireball from the opposite side. We will long remember watching the collapse of the World Trade Center and the sight of the giant dust cloud that arose above lower Manhattan—towering buildings reduced to giant piles of burning rubble. And in response to these premeditated, murderous acts of mass destruction, American intelligence and the American military must respond immediately by securing this country and its people from any further threats and retaliating swiftly with overwhelming and unyielding force against the enemy responsible for these deadly acts.

There will be another component, also—one more poignant, more personal and more important than the structural damage—to our memory of the violence. We will remember last words of telephone conversations cut off at the moment of the blast; stories of wheelchairs and their occupants wedged in narrow stairways, and the running bodies who could only hope to escape themselves; the words of a battered, bruised colossus of a firefighter sobbing, “I tried to save them all—but I couldn’t”; ghostly figures, caked in the dust of the wreckage, running north through the streets of Manhattan; endless lines of donors waiting to give blood.

The first two acts of terror were perpetrated not against military installations or personnel, but against thousands upon thousands of civilians. To a nation that has repeatedly modified its military strategies to spare enemy civilians, such acts of mass murder are beyond comprehension. And although we have even seen photographs and news footage of rejoicing crowds escorting proud mothers to the funerals of teenage sons—youths killed at their own hands in suicidal acts of terror—we have steadfastly refused to believe that there are communities in which human lives are held as cheaply as the breath with which one whispers the names of the deceased.

And so, while the American military mobilizes in response to these attacks, the civilians of our nation must respond as well. These acts of terror were committed against civilians with the intention of creating chaos and striking fear into the hearts of our people. Our response must therefore be to fight this terror as civilians. As firefighters and rescue workers, doctors and nurses, reporters and news personnel, truck drivers and construction workers, we must tend with every ounce of diligence and skill to the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of our fellow citizens. All of our nation, regardless of proximity to the scenes of disaster, must fight chaos and fear with the steadfast courage of deliberate calm. We must return to our daily lives, not to business as usual, but with a sense of deep sorrow and a consciousness of the losses our fellow Americans have suffered through these tragic events, and with a firm resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever recurring.

In time, we will clear away dust and rubble, and rebuild our fallen structures of concrete and steel. But to honor the men and women whose lives will never be rebuilt, it is the duty of the American people to have courage, and to make the fight against terror a part of our national will.

Benjamin I. Rapoport ’03, a Crimson editor, is a physics concentrator in Lowell House.