"Acts of Defiance in the Face of Terrorism"

The Wooster Daily Record. September 13, 2001.

I study political violence for a living, yet I, too, am shaken and unsure how to react. As I sit here today in my office, only a few miles from the still-burning Pentagon, images of the carnage in my native New York dominate my thoughts. It makes it hard to concentrate on work, and it makes the everyday things seem so trivial. Only now, twenty four hours after the tragedy began to unfold, have I begun to realize how this has affected me on so many levels.

As a member of what normally feels like an insular, safe Wooster community, I feel more vulnerable than ever. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I feel emptiness where the heart of my city was, and I feel violated. As a temporary resident in our nation’s capital, the center of American power, I am struck by how powerless I feel. As an American, I feel threatened and confused, where only yesterday I felt proud and invincible. As a citizen of the global community, I have been shocked into the reality of the reach of global terrorism. As a human being, I am appalled at the cruelty and inhumanity of these acts of terrorism. As someone who hopes to understand unspeakable acts, I am at a loss to understand this one, perhaps because it hits so close to home.

I know only these things: Someone, for some reason, has decided to strike at the United States. Despite the many people killed, the intended proximate target of this attack was American power. The goal was to instill a paralyzing fear in the hearts and minds of all citizens of the US, and perhaps its allies as well. Thus, we – all of us – are the real targets of this attack. This explains why many of us, even those of us who were not near the attacks, or who knew no one affected by them, felt this tragedy so deeply.

I am one of the lucky ones. I was nowhere near danger, although the chaos of a panicked Washington DC was all around me. I lost no one dear to me in either attack. Like so many Americans, after a nerve-wracking day of calling and e-mailing, I discovered that, despite some close calls, all family and friends in New York were safe.

Yet despite our suffering, it compares little to that of the many innocent victims who were killed, and to the pain that their families are experiencing. Those in the buildings at the time of the attack were killed not because of who they were, but because of where they were – in offices in two of the most recognizable symbols of American military and financial power. Those aboard the doomed planes became both terror victims and instruments of terror. Valiant emergency workers who saved countless lives by evacuating the buildings and fighting fires and the chaos of the moment lost their lives. And our innocence, lost in the ashes of Pearl Harbor but seemingly regained again in the postwar era, has been lost again.

Yet we must not succumb to fear, for if we do the terrorists have won. Surely our lives will be different now. We may be more aware, more inconvenienced, more insecure. But we must learn to deal with this tragedy and to move on, to live our lives as fully and as entirely as before. I came to my office today, even though classes here have been cancelled, to live my life as normally as possible, for to do so in the face of yesterday’s terrorist attacks is itself an act of defiance.

This tragedy was full of acts of defiance and of heroism. I think of my girlfriend’s brother, an EMT in New York who saw things he will never forget, who lost fellow emergency workers in the disaster, and who only returned home safely this morning. His acts of heroism were reflexes – what he thought he needed to do. I think of the people at the Pentagon who ran into the burning rubble to try to save their co-workers. I think of the lines across the country at blood banks and Red Cross stations, many of which formed only hours after the tragedy began to unfold.

We can all do something, our own acts of heroism, our own acts of defiance. I carry on as before because writing this may be able to help someone else cope with the tragedy. I will work later today on an article about teaching about human rights, in the hope that it will further enable us to instill an appreciation for the value of all life. I plan to go and give blood after I am finished here, and to meet with students who want to talk about their experiences, their concerns.

I will try to remember how this day reminded me of the beauty and the goodness of human nature, rather than its darker side. I will remember the outpouring of support from my local community in Wooster. I will feel pride in the heroism of New York’s citizens, and the resilience with which I know the city is infused. I will think of the bravery with which this whole nation comforted each other, and rallied behind its leaders. I will remember the outpouring of support from the global community, and the condemnation of these acts from around the globe. I will remember always the humanity of the moment. I will endeavor always to continue to try and understand such acts, and to help others cope with them. I will not let them – whoever they are – dictate my life, my actions. I will not let them make me hate, make me live in fear. I will not let them win. These are my acts of defiance.

MATTHEW KRAIN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the College of Wooster. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland – College Park.