10/20/2001
My parents' mail carrier has anthrax. Late last night my nutty old ex-girlfriend left a couple of urgent messages to that effect, and checking out the article, it was really very clear: the NJDOT, the golf course,the psychiatric hospital, the school for the deaf--those four items, named as being on the sick carrier's route, bracket the house I grew up in as neatly as you could possibly ask. I'd been watching that little trace element in the news grimly, of course--the Trenton postmarks on several of the poisoned letters--but I had mostly decided that a terrorist would not be quick to attack his own neighborhood, and Trenton has no visible targets to speak of anyway.
But of course the postal carrier is just as vulnerable picking up a letter as delivering one. And yes, there is some chance that one or two of those hardy little spores might tumble back out into a neighbor's mailbox. It's all a great deal too close for comfort. My parents were already trying to fix the house up and sell it as fast as possible; I'm kicking myself now for not spending a few more weekends down their way, replacing the ceiling tiles I spend my teenage years perforating, painting the outer trim before the air got too cold for paint to dry overnight, tearing out the wreckage of the wood-walled in-ground pool destroyed more than fifteen years ago by three nations of ants and a wayward groundhog. The faster they move out to hill country, the better.
For the last two weeks my household has never been far from the question of our immediate safety. Three nights at a stretch were miserably consumed by that debate, and in the end we probably eased off it as much because we could no longer tolerate the question as because we had come to any very stable answer. In the end, there's no answer that can be deduced; it's a gamble, pure and simple. Except this isn't a known game, such that somebody somewhere has studied the probabilities and can give you at least that yardstick to choose by.
We've sent appeals far and wide for people to give us their input on this one, and I'm still interested in what people think about it. But it's strange how unsatisfying the answers have been, in the main.
Again and again people have said things like "if we live in fear then the terrorists win." I'm truly baffled by this. Are the terrorists really so concerned with my emotional state? Are we talking about the same battleground at all? There are people in the world who want to kill me because I live where I live. Some of them are willing to die in order to accomplish it. That, in case it isn't clear, is what I'm afraid of. This is not, as Rebecca put it, "something internal, a fear that I should confront and work my way through."
The other thing people have been quick to point out is that no other place is safe either. This is more valid, I think--indeed it is the greatest lesson we have had to learn from being attacked, and I'm not at all sure that many of us are getting the hang of it. Yes, New York was always dangerous, and cars are dangerous, and any place we might run to will be dangerous. But differences of degree are real. New York's typical dangers were of street crime or accidents, which are part of life everywhere, and which, importantly, can be guarded against and resisted on a case-by-case basis to a considerable extent. You might talk a mugger down. You might be nimble enough to evade an accident in the making. These are no perfect reassurances, of course, but they're something; even when an awful stroke of luck befalls you, you frequently have a chance to get out intact if you play your cards right.
But the things that frighten me are the weapons of mass destruction. Nerve gas, biological weapons, nuclear explosions--these things you do not finesse when they arrive. Either you were in their path, or you weren't. And though I can't say whether such attacks are likely, they are clearly more likely to happen here these days than they are in, say, Johannesburg. I don't think more planes are likely to fall on New York; that, maybe, is more likely in other American cities not yet touched. But if they found a way to up the ante--to make an attack of a substantially greater magnitude--the New York becomes a first pick all over again. This is the biggest American city, and the most important symbolically.
Here, to be morbid, are the things I do worry about:
These things, the unpredictable things too big and too sudden to dodge, make me fret about staying. So far we seem to have decided--if only by default--to stay. And it's not that I want to go. Life is great here, right now. We'd planned to leave in a couple of years anyway. It galls to be forced to think about leaving early. And I'd hate to leave and find out over time that we'd have been fine--nobody likes to make the wrong gamble.
But our cozy lifestyle will be nothing if somebody dies in a terrorist attack. And that's not just paranoia any more.
No conclusions to draw in this installment. Unfortunately.