Here is what women around the country had to say about last week’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington:
Helena Cobban
Columnist, in The Christian Science Monitor
I still don’t know who the masterminds of our “Black September” attacks were. But once additional information becomes available, President Bush should do what he can to fashion a targeted response that punishes those responsible, while taking care to avoid collateral damage and overkill.
And meantime, he should continue holding out an active hand of friendship to all the world’s peoples–without exception. Blaming any one national or religious group for the wrongdoing of a small number of its members would be as foolish today as it would have been, in 1945, to try to punish all the Germans.
Ellen Goodman
Columnist, in The Boston Globe
All summer, the news that filled the airwaves seemed at times like a trivial pursuit. The TV and newsmagazines made sharks our No. 1 enemy. The cable shows covered Gary Condit like a blanket.
Stories on “air rage” chronicled the anger of passengers at planes that were . . . late. And even the news of repeated suicide bombings in Israel had become, I am ashamed to say, numbingly ordinary.
Some evenings, I turned the TV news on, heard the headlines and turned it off declaring scornfully, “No news tonight.” Yet I knew always, deep down, what a luxury it is to live with “no news.” What a profound and spendthrift luxury to feel removed, even immune, from the world. To feel safe.
In the midst of this attack, Americans had to reach back 60 years into our grab bag of metaphors to find a Day of Infamy. After all, since then generations of Americans have lived, in many ways, a charmed life.
Some of us have held onto that charm tightly, anxiously, ever since we were taught to duck and cover in the schoolroom. We felt our luck shaken . . . when Kennedy stood off Khruschev over Cuba, when hostages were taken in Iran, when a government building was brought down in Oklahoma City.
But we’ve only known war offshore. We’ve only known intellectually the ease with which a cosmopolitan city like Sarajevo can be reduced to rubble. The ease with which cities like Jerusalem and Belfast can become war zones.
We pushed aside the sense of our vulnerability–not to a nation-enemy with a missile, but to a handful of men armed with plastic knives and hatred.
Now terror has become our reality show.
Catharine MacKinnon
University of Michigan law professor specializing in violence against women, on womens-enews.org
When the platitudes about “tragedy” are done, the moralistic sanctimony over evil spent, and the transparent grasping of authorities for authority, of the powers for power, is for the moment over, will we face this: This is a man-made atrocity.
We made the men who could, and did, do it. . . . We need to look at how.
Susan Estrich
University of Southern California law professor, in USA Today
There is an understandable urge right now to give the government more power to know everything about us, in the hopes that it will learn more about the dangerous few. And even those who understand that branding by race or ethnic origin is the definition of racism have trouble not engaging in it, with the scope of Tuesday’s destruction so fresh in mind. As the United States faces a new war against uncertain and hidden enemies, the temptation to sacrifice our freedom in the hopes of protecting ourselves from harm is powerful.
Robin Morgan
Feminist writer and former editor of Ms. who lives in lower Manhattan, in an e-mail to “sisters and friends”
Violence IS psychosis–but it’s a psychosis that contemporary incumbent leaders of most nations share with their insurgent opponents.
Even as we mourn, we somehow must continue to dare audaciously to envision and revision a different way, a way out of this savage age, to a time when our species will look back and gasp, recoiling at its own former barbarism.
Even as we weep, we must somehow reorganize to reaffirm our capacity to change the world, each other, and ourselves–to insist, even in the teeth of despair, on a politics that is possible and necessary: a politics not of thanatos and death, but of eros and joy.
Martha Burk
Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, on womensenews.org
The voices of women must be heard as to how the world community should respond in the coming days. There are many women’s groups around the globe working for peace and against war, terrorism and oppression. Women should be at the table along with men when decisions are made as to the future of our country and the world.
Joan Ryan
Columnist, in the San Francisco Chronicle
When somebody asks, “How are you?” they mean it. They want to know because they’re going through the same waves of anger and sadness and disbelief. There’s an undercurrent of goodwill and appreciation in our conversations today, born, perhaps, of realizing that in an instant our lives can change, that we can lose everything as abruptly and randomly as a bolt of lightning.
That’s why the address-book pages and files and calendars fluttering through the Manhattan streets feel as though they are pieces of our own lives. That’s why when we hear about the woman searching for her husband’s name on a World Trade Center list of the dead, and we hear the pain in her voice when she says, “I can’t stand thinking he died without me there holding his hand,” we fight back tears. The woman is a stranger, but she’s not. We know her. She is you or your sister or your best friend.
