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Living With Terror
After
Rosh Hashanah services
on the evening of September 17, our daughter Sarah, who had been unusually
docile about sitting still, complained that she felt hot and tired. At
home, we took her temperature and found that she had a slight fever, but
she slept soundly through the night and by the afternoon of the next day
was back to normal—her headstrong, wildly energetic self.
The same could
not be said for me.
I’m used to having
a knot in my stomach when Sarah doesn’t feel well, but this was different,
much worse. Before I knew it, my thoughts had turned uncontrollably to
how I could not protect her—from another terrorist attack, from
the knowledge of the ones that had already taken place. The feeling of
helpless anxiety took days to recede, and it continues to lurk at the
edge of consciousness. I have sensed the same watchful equilibrium in
others, all of us alert for anything that might remind us, too forcefully
and vividly, of the new and dangerous world revealed on the morning of
September 11. We are learning to live, not in, but with, terror.
As I write this,
it is a month since hijacked planes damaged the Pentagon, destroyed the
World Trade Center, and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing thousands
and, in the sadly true clichÈ, “changing forever” Americans’ feeling of
safety within our own borders. Among the dead are 14 Penn alumni, based
on our current information (please see p. 86 for their names). Some 300
alumni worked in the area of the World Trade Center, and thousands more
feared for, or actually lost, friends and relatives. All of us were, and
continue to be, affected.
In this issue,
we acknowledge the impact of the terrorist attacks on the University community
with a special section, “September 11 & After.” An expanded version
of “Alumni Voices” offers three perspectives
from New York alumni on the Twin Towers collapse and the rescue/recovery
effort; in “Notes From the Undergrad,”
two students seeking to foster greater media coverage of hate crimes describe
their effort to rally support, with help from fellow students and Penn
administrators. And President Rodin, in “From
College Hall,” addresses the tragedy as well. We also report on campus
reactions in the days following the attacks and on alumni efforts to both
connect with each other and offer support to victims. Finally, for “Thinking
About 9/11,” we contacted a broad spectrum of Penn faculty to share
their expert insights on the tragedy and its consequences.
But, like the
people in New York, Washington, and across the country trying their best
to return to “normal,” we are also doing what we usually do—by providing
our regular mix of feature articles and departments, both serious and
not, as well.
Two previously
scheduled articles have connections with the current tragedy. First, the
posters seeking information about missing loved ones—featuring pictures
taken at weddings, vacations, and other happy occasions—that have appeared
in New York cannot help but echo the family photographs of Holocaust victims
discovered by Ann Weiss. In “The Last Album: Lives
in Memory,” Weiss describes how she came to learn of the photos while
touring a museum at Auschwitz in 1986 and tells the stories of three of
those pictured.
When we planned
it, “The Stamp Seal Mystery” by senior editor
Samuel Hughes, which concerns a tiny artifact that may have major implications
for how writing developed and spread in Asia, was a kind of scholarly
adventure story, in which intrepid present-day archaeologist Dr. Fredrik
T. Hiebert (perhaps) confirmed the theories of an old archaeologist-hero
of his. It is that still, but the ending is shadowed by the fact that
the find took place in Turkmenistan, on the border of Afghanistan. With
the resulting uncertainty about further investigations in the near future,
it is now also a reminder of other potential losses—historical, intellectual,
cultural—of war.
—John Prendergast C’80
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