Last week I was asked several times: "So, what do you think about all this terrorism lately?" Some of the inquirers did not know where I am from. They did not know that in my country, terrorist attacks are a sad fixture of a daily life scarred by blood and tears. They did not know that the scenes on CNN this week -- the frightened crowds, injured civilians, crying parents, flying debris and a president declaring that we will not let terrorists wear us down -- are as familiar to me as the musical tone announcing the evening news.
Some of the inquirers knew that I am Israeli. And they asked their question with the purpose of getting some advice from me. Advice on how to react to the news of a plane explosion or a bomb; what to say when you read the newspapers the next day; how to deal with the pictures of the innocent victims and the lists of names of high school kids that will never graduate. My American classmates are now experiencing what my country has been dealing with since its founding. Apparently I was not the only one to see this similarity.
In last week's edition of "Newsweek" Frank Deford writes: "We of the United States are in Israel now. Starting last Saturday morning, we are, too, in Belfast, and Mindanao and Beirut and Saudi Arabia and in all the other places where terror has become potluck." And what happened to the Israelis after all these years happened here last week. We in America became hardened, almost uncaring. We no longer cried out in grief or demanded that the Games be discontinued. We have begun to accept the new reality of terror.
Last spring a friend blitzed me after hearing the latest news on yet another terrorist bombing in Israel -- "Oh god. This is a nightmare. How are we supposed to react to these? Every time I hear about another one, I am overcome with this horrified, helpless feeling. But there is nothing to do. Just go to class and study for finals and go on with our lives? It is so hard to just do that. What do you do?"
What do I do? What do we all do, here, now, after TWA flight 800 and Atlanta? Like all of us I am only an average Dartmouth student. I am worried about midterms and the weather and how many parties will there be this weekend when my friends come up to visit. So it was so much easier to flick the TV channel away from the scenes of the bomb, of the plane, of the victims. I can't worry about everything that happens to everyone everywhere else, right? If I did, how would I ever have time for Tubestock?
Deford in his essay speaks about the "everyday service charge that terrorism deducts from emotional ATM." I know about that service charge -- at home I pay it every day. And I thought I could escape it all here, in the United States of America. I mistakenly thought that I wanted to escape it.
It has taken me a long time to figure out what I am trying to say with all this. What I do know was that it angers and upsets me that I was not affected by last week's news. That I could have changed the channel. That I was not patient enough to listen to the news about Flight 800. That I skipped the front page of the paper and only looked for the medal results. That no one else seemed to really care either.
I know I don't want to get used to this violence and terrorism. I want to be able cry every time I hear of an innocent woman who went to a rock concert and is not coming back home to her kids. I want to know that we will all speak out against such incidents of "random public carnage" (Deford). Maybe I do not really want to escape that service charge, because as painful as it is, it ties me to the real world beyond the Connecticut river, to my past and all of our futures.
