Dear Everyone,

We spent the past 4 days in New York. I know that some of you are also New Yorkers by birth, as I am, so you will know what I mean when I tell how important it was for me to go "home" and touch the earth that I call my own. My middle daughter lives there still. She also works for Morgan Stanley, although not in the WTC, and she needed her mom.

This was a trip that we had planned for a month because a dear old
friend of my husband's was having a retirement party on the 13th. The party was on Long Island, and we did go, and were glad to be there. One of the son's-in-law of the retiree works for the Port Authority and was a survivor of the attacks. He is suffering from a variety of things: survivor's guilt, post-traumatic stress, and a need to put on a strong, brave face since his wife is in total denial that anything happened him.

I'll spare you the details of his ordeal, since you've heard countless stories just like it, I'm sure. But it was different for us to be standing in front of someone who had suffered so much and was finding it impossible to come to grips with it.

So the bulk of our evening, as well as the bulk of several other's, was spent in talking with him, helping him to recognize that asking for help at this time would not be a sign of weakness, and also trying to help his wife to give him permission, so to speak, to seek the help he so obviously needs. I was glad for all of my pastoral training and my years of chaplaincy work.  It also made me realize that there are thousands of people out there who may have similar family structures and who have only begun the descent into depression and traumatic stress that may play themselves out inappropriately in years to come.

Of course, seeing that made me realize how easy it is for any of us to internalize fear, anger, wrongs, slights, and all negative emotional responses unwittingly, thinking that we are doing the right thing by not being a burden, or feeling the need to be strong so that others will not perceive us as lacking in some fundamental way. And that of course led me to think long and hard about all of the millions of people around the world who have internalized their anger toward the US as a whole for pushing our weight around and assuming that the whole world sees all things exactly as the US says they should. So here I will digress from my weekend, with your indulgence, if I may.

One of the frightening things about the news media (with the exception of PBS and possibly the NY Times), with all of their very good intentions, is how, in the most subtle and often, I believe, unconscious ways, they have left out details of bin Laden's path to hatred of America.  Of course, people who do as he has done over the past 10 or more years probably have a loose screw somewhere to begin with. But his hatred of America isn't "mysterious," as Dick Cheney said yesterday.  It is, unfortunately, rational within the "madman's context." 

I'm assuming most of you know this, but in case you don't, bin Laden, who is a fabulously wealthy Saudi, went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians.  He was not supported financially, from what I can understand, by the CIA, because he had his own money. But he was trained by them. Bin Laden probably went to Afghanistan already an extremist, but what he saw there of the Russians hardened him and firmed his resolve about the necessity of "pure" Muslim states.  After the successful ousting of the Russians, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. This was just at the end of the Gulf War, and what he found there were American troops "occupying," as he saw it, the most sacred land of the Muslim world, and he turned his wrath against the Russian occupiers to the Americans.  It isn't too much of a stretch for any of us willing to don the mental hat of an even slightly askew extremist, to begin to understand bin Laden's relentless hatred of the giant bully that he saw America to be.  After all, many of us have that perception of our own country, a perception only heightened by the attitudes of the Bush Administration toward treaty after treaty subscribed to by all other civilized nations.

My point in telling, or for some of you, retelling this story is to say how important it is for each of us to try to do whatever we can to let our leaders know that we seek a balanced, reasoned response, and not revenge.  For people who understand the wisdom of Jesus, it was exactly this type of eye-for-an-eye mentality that he struggled against. I'm not sure that we should, in this case, be turning the other cheek, but as a nation that likes to call itself Christian (to the horror of many of us), it certainly seems like a good idea to keep Jesus' idea in mind as we struggle for appropriate, measured, and hopefully successful responses to what has happened to us as a nation.  The rest of the world wants to join us, and my prayer at this time is that we don't end up pushing them away. Digression finished.

On Friday we went into Manhattan to spend the weekend with my daughter and her boyfriend. New Yorkers are an amazing lot - friendly, helpful, open, tough, brash, hardened, fearless, streetwise, and naive, all at the same time. And it was wonderful to see how each of these qualities is being used to its best advantage at this time.  My daughter lives on E. 46th street, not far from the UN. The roads there are blocked off by giant orange earth movers filled with sand, and manned by their Dept. of Sanitation drivers, who sit in them for their 8 hour shifts, reading, talking to passing strangers, and waiting. 

We walked for hours, all over the city. Sak's took out all of their window displays and wrote in each empty, darkened display area "With Sadness." Many businesses and stores have signs thanking the rescuers and offering condolences. Each fire station is filled with candles and flowers and grieving firemen, and passers-by who stop to add to their memorials, shake hands and even hug the firemen who stand there, not at all afraid to cry or show how deeply they have been wounded.  And yet I didn't feel among even one of them the kind of anger and vengefulness that I saw of Cheney's face.  They are about the business of saving, not destroying life, and while they certainly can be whipped up to seek revenge, they would also be satisfied if our government did not do more to enflame the wrath of those ready to maim and destroy us at any cost. 

On Friday night, each apartment building and shop set out little tables, or made spaces on first floor ledges or planting areas in front of buildings for candles, and everywhere we went  there were little American flags, which somehow seemed appropriate and not the least bit jingoistic, people standing in front of their buildings, and candles burning in remembrance. People greeted one another, stopping to chat with strangers, and asking if everyone was all right. It was comforting.

On Saturday we walked for most of the day as well.  We went to the Noguchi Museum in Queens, a must-go place for anyone who has never been there, and the perfect place to reflect on all of our relationships, both human and to the Earth itself.

Saturday night we went to see The Producers. It was even more wonderful than they said it would be, and gave us a couple of hours respite from the reality now descending on us. At the end, the audience was wild and on its feet. The cast came to the edge of the stage, as if to take more bows, and started singing God Bless America (a song I have always disliked). We all sang with them, cried and hugged, and then went out into the night and the emergency vehicles and the sanitation trucks and the grimness of what has happened to us. But we were helped, and we knew it.

On Sunday, Nola and I went down to Canal Street, an excursion we had planned to make before all this happened, to a large Chinese department store to get things we can only get there.  Canal Street is the demarcation zone. To the north, is blue sky and Life As We Know It. To the South are barricades, Secret Service men, and white smoke billowing from the WTC Plaza, about 10 blocks away.  Here it was really easy to see life being lived on two levels. There were cars with bombed out windows, wrapped in plastic (as evidence, I suppose), and covered with candles and flowers. There were people checking ID's of those wanting to go onto certain streets, and there were people like us, gathering needful things so that we could go on, putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes sure of ourselves, and sometimes just doing it, because that is what people do.

Now we are back home. I wish I could have stayed. It is home to me. But this is where I live, and now I am trying to figure out what it is I should be doing.  Part of it is writing to legislators, begging them to be reasonable, and not to make belligerent posturing the order of the day.  Part of it is writing to people like you, telling what I know, hoping that this will provide the catharsis I so badly need for myself. I hope you all are also figuring out what is right for you to be doing. For each of us, I'm sure, it will be different, at least superficially. But under it all, I suspect that those who occupy the same circles I do will want, also, to keep us from becoming vengeful and plunging into a war so dangerous that there will be no winners. And perhaps no survivors. 

My love and caring to all of you,

Jill Brody

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