The School Year in Terror

The beginning of the school year seems like a long time ago as I look back on it from the waning days of May. Eight months of diverse excesses culminating in three weeks’ worth of work-induced fatigue have a tendency to blur the edges of memory, if not make one forget altogether. But as I sit here today, I can’t help but remember the most pointed thing I learned this year, on a morning very much like the present one, two seasons ago.

The day before classes began, at 10 a.m. on Sept. 11, CCraigie23 IMed me, “I can’t believe this.” As is often the case, his tone got lost somewhere in the type and after a second I replied, “I know, it’s awesome. Jordan’s coming out of retirement.” Michael Jordan had indeed been scheduled to announce his comeback that morning, though in the end he did not—and moments later I would find out why.

A school year has passed since Sept. 11, though very few days have gone by that do not in some way bear its mark. After the shock there was the patriotism, and then the charges of jingoism that only grew louder as patriotic rhetoric turned into patriotic bombs during the offensive in Afghanistan. The Taliban fell but Osama was never found and while regime change is nice, it’s tough to say exactly what Operation Enduring Freedom accomplished. While the world might be a little less safe for terrorists, it doesn’t appear to be much safer for us.

A few days before Christmas, Richard Reid tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with his Nikes and some plastic explosives. The quick thinking of flight attendant Hermis Moutardier prevented Reid from succeeding and probably saved almost 200 lives, but it did little to assuage my tragic thoughts when I boarded a transatlantic plane at the beginning of intersession a month later. As red-clad Virgin Atlantic stewardesses went up and down the aisles demurely serving dinner, a heretofore-unknown seriousness seemed to creep into the sides of their smiles. If there is indeed a war on terrorism, they were the newest foot soldiers; the hardness in their eyes reflected the fact that tackling terrorists was now a part of their job description. I’m sure you didn’t sign on for this.

Behind it all there was the steady march of two seemingly inexorable processes: the excavation of bodies in New York and the destruction of suicide bombings in Israel. Workers at Ground Zero paused to honor the victims of Sept. 11 every time remains were removed from the rubble and to the firefighters who worked around the clock unearthing their own, it didn’t matter that the official death toll only shrunk as time went on. In Israel there wasn’t even time to pause to honor the dead, as each day brought with it a new collection of ferocious headlines. In the U.S. we could be thankful that for us, at least, terror was still just an event and not yet a way of life.

But over the last few weeks, voices of varying authority have cautioned that in the future we can only expect to see more terror in the Homeland. On Sunday Dick Cheney told the country that another terrorist attack is “not a matter of if, but when” and as much as we’d like to be able to, it’s hard to disagree with him. The next day FBI Director Robert Mueller said that Palestinian-style suicide bombers will inevitably infect the United States and there is nothing we can do about it. “I wish I could be more optimistic,” he concluded. Me, too.

Coming, coincidentally enough, as we prepare to leave school for the summer, this flurry of official admonishments provides a fitting bookend to a year that began with Sept. 11. College is a famously sheltered place, and the walls of ivy that surround us are designed, in part, to hold the world constant so that we might study it. Cheney’s warning should give notice, however, that the world we are about to rejoin is very different than the one we left when we came to school in the fall.

Every time a plane flies low overhead we are now compelled to wonder if we’re watching the tool of imminent history fly by, while last August we might not have even noticed it. Like changing styles, thoughts that were paranoid last summer are today pragmatic and we quietly accept the fact that there is more terror in our country’s future. Uncertainty now occupies a permanent place in American life; fear has tacitly woven itself into the fabric of our daily routines.

What a difference a school year makes.

Kevin Hartnett ’03 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. His column appears regularly.