LONELY ON THE OUTSIDE
"This isn't like Vietnam," they argue before I've even broached a comparison -- preemptively dismissing any anti-imperialist pleas for world peace as naive, vestiges of ancient history. "These people," by which they mean Islamic fundamentalists, Iraqis, and Palestinians, "want to kill us," they threaten, as if I'd be responsible for the victims of the next terrorist attack if I dared question the war on terrorism. Over the past year, I've humored these positions from seemingly intelligent people who've been driven, by fear and emotionalism and myopic priorities, to falling in line with a corporate-centered foreign policy presided over by a right-wing administration that is, at best, a laughably transparent puppet of militaristic racists.

It's been a disappointment. Vietnam's particulars aside, Vietnam taught us some valuable lessons about respecting root causes and relying on force as our primary foreign-policy tool. But 27 years after the US put its tail between its legs and left Saigon, people still believe that history began yesterday and that war ensures peace. I expect no better of hypocritical moneyed toadies like G.W. Bush and unconvincingly closeted fascists like John Ashcroft. If feeding the public's jingoism makes them popular, they'll exploit it; if war protects their cronies' investments, they'll wage it; if an international crisis gives them the excuse to rob uppity citizens of their civil rights, they'll deport foreign labor and frisk babes-in-arms at airports until we all get the message. But the rest of us should know better. Apparently, a lot of us don't. Amid our passive acceptance, simple truths have been lost: war is evil and always should be resisted; religion, race, and nationality are artificial distinctions; and rights are just that and must not be relinquished.

For the year since last September 11, it's been frustrating to live among so many dupes -- biting my tongue around neo-patriotic middle-agers subconsciously seeking vindication for only pretending to have been allied with the left in the '60s, and around people in their 20s and 30s who spent their formative years being lulled into conformity and anti-intellectualism by the commercial pandering of MTV and Disney. Since Reagan, American business, government, media, and entertainment have worked hard to discredit dissent and disenfranchise dissenters. Judging from all the flag-spangled bumper stickers and liberal war-mongering afoot these days, it worked, and that's the real tragedy brought home to me over the past year.

Old comrades and occasional young allies recognize the September 11 terrorist attacks, our bloody response to them, and the subsequent assault on the Bill of Rights for the madness they are -- part of a continuum of greed and violence and false values that governments and religions impose on their followers. But we are an increasingly less-vocal minority, silenced by the ignorant rabble and pseudo-pragmatists alike. It's been a lonely year.

-- Clif Garboden

PARANOIA
I woke up one Sunday morning in July and noticed something odd about the light coming through my window shades. It clearly wasn't sunny outside, but this wasn't the typical soft light thrown from an overcast sky; it was more of a sepia glare, bright and unusual for midmorning. In my half-awake fog, I rolled over and wondered, with surprisingly little alarm, whether this bizarre mustard-yellow tone was the color of a nuclear sky. Had they detonated the dirty bomb? I finally dragged myself into a more lucid frame of mind; I could hear my neighbors in their yard, my roommate stumbling toward the bathroom, and I realized that things were happening as they normally do on an undisturbed Sunday morning.

In the year that's followed the shock of last September, the media has served as both a lifeline to crucial information and a panic switch. In July, the buzz was Al Qaeda's access to nuclear material and the escalating standoff between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Even a news junkie like me has to tune it out once in a while, and on this particular weekend, although my subconscious was well attuned to the most recent worrisome developments, I hadn't paid attention to the details of the latest news. Otherwise, I would have known about the wildfire in Quebec that had sent a giant smoke plume over much of the Northeastern United States. That, of course, accounted for the bizarre haze that hung overhead on that Sunday morning.

In hindsight, I can laugh about my casual misconception during that waking moment between sleep and clarity. But I'm troubled by what it reveals about the workings of the post-9/11 mind. We don't hear backfiring cars, the screams of jet engines, or even thunder with quite the same innocence that we used to. In those brief disorienting moments, we were conditioned to expect the worst, a sad post-9/11 reality.

-- Kate Cohen

A HATEFUL DAY
I hate that day. I hate everything about it: the fire-snorting skyscrapers, the swelling sirens, the business suits scrambling to safety, the televised chaos, the crumpling cityscape, the charcoal clouds puffing out like colossal cotton balls, the concrete crumbs, the crushed cars, the dusty cement caked on faces like ghostly war paint, the reports of thousands "missing," the twisted metal, the ensuing fire's orange glow, the haunting images that paralyzed the people from sea to shining sea.

I hate that my mother had to call to tell me. I hate that she shrilled in the kind of frantic despair a daughter never, ever, ever wants to hear from a parent. I hate that I was seated in a gray cubicle, typing away like an automaton, when I heard about the end of the world. I hate that my department didn't have access to a television, so my co-workers and I could only learn about the crashes heard 'round the world from a BBC Internet live feed. I hate that when a fourth plane was pronounced MIA, a puerile office intern exuberantly squeaked, "I hope it gets Bush in the White House!" I hate that I immediately rebuked him. I hate that he later apologized, but I avoided him for the rest of the semester.

I hate the shorthand terms we, the blathering, blustering media, use: "nine-one-one," "nine-11," and "September 11th." I hate that every time we utter such aliases, we increasingly desensitize ourselves to the bone-crushing impact of that day. I hate that Noam Chomsky published a book about that day. I hate that Paul McCartney wrote a mediocre anthem titled "Freedom" in honor of that day. I hate that Springsteen made a record largely consisting of platitudes about that day, and that the American media bicker about their contribution to the national dialogue.

I hate thinking about that day. I hate the tremendous shame, embarrassment, and complicity I initially felt for living in a city where two unsuspecting weapons of mass destruction were launched. I hate the way that day makes me feel a year later: terrified, tragic, toothless, anguished, aghast, solemn, sullen, morose, hopeless, depressed, violated, irate, enraged, livid, pissed off, pissed on, just plain pissed. I hate that when I sit down and try to articulate how my life has changed since that day, all I come up with is hate.

-- Camille Dodero

FROM DEFENSE TO OFFENSE
When my mom first presented me with a shiny, high-pitched whistle to ward off creepy men several years ago, I cringed. Oh, God, I, the proud-to-be-independent daughter, thought. How maternal. How overprotective. How lame. I had a similar reaction when my mom forked out $20 to buy me a handy, tote-size canister of mace last summer.

Obligation forced me to stuff these personal-safety items into my bag anyway, where they remain largely forgotten. But on those rare occasions when I've braved solo late-night walks home from the T station, I've found myself clutching that whistle on my key chain or handling the mace-spray nozzle. In these moments, I admit, I have felt more safe on the streets -- and more appreciative of my mother's care.

Since 9/11, though, my instruments of self-defense have become instruments of trouble. Walking into the Suffolk County Courthouse [in Boston], for example, I have experienced firsthand how people can get caught up in the paranoia sweeping the nation in the post-9/11 world. Last fall, a slight yet zealous security guard was stationed at the court entrance, his eyes focused, laser-like, on the screen of a bag-scanning machine. Person after person navigated the checkpoint without incident; they placed their briefcases on conveyor belts and proceeded through the metal detector unscathed. As I entered the area, however, the guard spotted something that raised suspicion.

"Hey, you, come here!" the man barked at me. "What the hell is this?" he asked, pointing feverishly at the screen. Perplexed, I looked at the screen, too. I could make out the figures of pens, notepads, keys, a stick of gum.

"Nothing," I responded.

"Look at this!" he said, jabbing his finger at the screen again. "Are you gonna tell me what this object is or are we gonna have to find out the hard way?"

Only then did it hit me: he saw, of all things, my whistle! After an embarrassing back-and-forth exchange, during which I had to whip out my whistle to demonstrate how it might stave off the hypothetical rapist, the guard finally let me go. Months later, it was my mace that heightened security concerns. This time, the incident took place at the Massachusetts State House. The guard insisted that I undergo a thorough "check," by which he meant that he would wave a hand-held metal detector over my person. As it happened, the detector kept sounding off right around the area of my chest. Humiliated, I was forced to explain that I had worn an under-wire bra that day.

Needless to say, after several post-9/11 security-checkpoint snafus, I opted to get rid of my personal-safety items altogether. The likelihood that I'll have to endure the humiliation that comes with carrying objects now seen as potential offensive weapons seems greater than the likelihood that I'll come face to face with a stalker. Let's just hope, for my sake, that I'm right.

-- Kristen Lombardi

NATIONAL HOLIDAY
It was over drinks with co-workers at the sleek, swank Ambrosia -- not exactly the place for one of life's little epiphanies. And it came only recently, nearly a year after the September 11 attacks that were its origin. But there it was, an epiphany nonetheless, and I had to set my colorful cocktail down on the bar and steady myself.

It came during a conversation about what we were each planning to do on the first anniversary of the attacks. Go to work? Be with family? Hole up in the house with the blinds closed, drawn to the blue flickering light of the television screen as we were on that date a year ago? "I bet most businesses will be closed," remarked one of my companions, words delivered in a tone so casual I did not expect to be struck by their weight. "September 11 will probably end up being a national holiday."

And there it was. A holiday. The conversation moved on, but I was held there in that moment, suspended in the blur of realization. For most of my three decades on this planet, holidays have been commemorations of things that happened before. Back then. In another time, another place, far removed from me. I'll take the days off, use them for long-weekend trips north, shopping excursions, the occasional scrubbing-down of my apartment. But they're just that: days off, to spend as I see fit, and, more than likely, to enjoy at my leisure.

There will be, for me, no enjoyment in a September 11 holiday. Because for the first time, it will be a holiday honoring a date, an event, a cataclysm, that occurred in my lifetime. A day of which my mind has ever-stinging memories, because of which my nights are still interrupted with dreams of deadly, doomed planes and crumpled, burning buildings.

September 11. A date that may someday be noted on the calendars of those who come after me, marking the anniversary of something that happened before, back then. The children I haven't yet had will take their holiday gladly, relish the release from school with early-fall games of kickball in the street. But in the midst of the slow, carefree celebration of unfettered hours, perhaps, if I am lucky, they will ask: why?

And I will tell them.

Because I remember.

-- Tamara Wieder

NEW BEGINNINGS
Last September 11, I felt grateful. Not because I was alive, but because my daughter wasn't. At least not quite. I was five months pregnant.

From the moment I learned I was pregnant until the moment it dawned on me that we were under attack, one thought would strike randomly, shooting adrenaline through my body when I was in the shower, in line at the coffee shop, doing laundry, talking with co-workers: I cannot believe I'm pregnant! On September 11 and afterward, I never experienced that again. Being pregnant finally lost its novelty and felt natural. I had a job to do -- the most important one I've ever had, and I was getting it done.

Now I have a seven-month-old. She's a happy baby. And another thought strikes at random moments: My mother was pregnant with me when JFK was assassinated. I was pregnant with Helen when those planes hit the towers.

Some day Helen may know what it's like to live through a tragedy that stops the world in its tracks. But in this year, this month, on this one-year anniversary of horror, she's never known that feeling. Not even close.

-- Susan Ryan-Vollmar

IN THE LINE OF IRE
Every bar has its share of bores. There's the guy who, once he's got a few Buds in him, will give you a blow-by-blow account of the time he ran 8000 yards in a high-school football game. There's the guy who insists on telling you everything you never wanted to know about data management. There's the incoherent guy who sputters little white flecks of mouth matter into your beer. And then there's me. Since September 11, I've become what you might call an Al Qaeda bore.

It happens pretty much every time I have one too many. I'll square my shoulders (as much as I can under the circumstances), look you right between the eyes, and start in on how the terrorist network needs to be "crushed." I say the word as though telling someone to be quiet in a movie theater: "Crushhhed!" The sentiment is, I'm sure, generally accompanied by a liberal spattering of beer-tainting, lip-finding spit. But I don't care. When you're talking about crushing Al Qaeda, there's little room for such trifles as decorum.

I can't be sure, but I suspect the regulars at my local are starting to avoid me. They know that if they lend me an ear, I'll claim full ownership. Once I get started on the subject of Abu Zubaydah, people will remember that their beer is down the other end of the bar, or they have to pop out to get cigarettes. They never return. And so, like all barroom bores, I must constantly ferret for new victims. About a week ago, I found one. "Nice jacket," I said. "Reminds me of the one Mohamed Atta was wearing." I made a pestle with my fist, grinding Al Qaeda into the palm of my hand. "Crushhhed!" Poor bastard didn't know what hit him.

I used to consider myself a fairly easygoing guy. No more. Since September 11, I've become bellicose, warlike. I'm like Genghis Khan after somebody keyed his horse. I'll swear blind that, given the opportunity, I'd be on the first plane to Tora Bora, a hunting knife clenched between my teeth, ready to eviscerate Osama myself. In a sober state, I'm fully aware that coming face to face with an unarmed, one-legged, no-fingered holy warrior would be enough to send me running for the hills (or away from the hills, depending on where his comrades were), but when I'm on the wrong side of six Newcastle Browns, I am absolutely fearless. I'll puke the fuckers to death if I have to.

As tiresome as it might be for the unfortunates who find themselves within earshot of my anti-terrorist tirades, it's worse for me. For me, the conversation never ends. Every morning, I scour the papers for the latest scrap of Rumsfeldian misinformation. At night, I trawl the news magazines for Pakistan analysis and Afghan punditry. I check the AP wire every 15 minutes to see if someone's been captured, killed. I find myself wondering what I used to read before September 11.

So the next time I'm bin Ladening you to tears, have a little sympathy. Remember: you can get away. I am stuck with myself. I am stuck with the fury that has been building up in my chest over the past year, like pennies being dropped into a jar. This is why I go on and on about Al Qaeda, and then go on and on some more. I need to get this stuff off my chest. I am tired of being weighed down with Osama hatred, Atta hatred, Omar fucking Saeed Sheikh hatred -- a deep, debilitating hatred for all those people who wish to do us harm. They need to be crushed. Crushhhed!

But please, for your sake, don't get me started.

-- Chris Wright

THE DANGER AROUND US
On a hot afternoon in late August I arrived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, to learn more about the fate of the disabled under the Nazis.

The historian whom I was planning to interview had told me where I would find her office once I got through security. Yet the full import of that word -- "security" -- didn't register until I actually arrived. A friend zipped right through. But I -- encumbered by a tape recorder, a cell phone, a Palm Pilot, even a Swiss Army knife -- immediately ran into trouble.

I took a few things out of my pockets and tried to walk through the metal detector. Beep. A guard told me, this time, take everything out. I tried to do as I was told, but I set off the alarm again -- and realized I still had my Palm Pilot on me. I removed it, and sent that through the x-ray machine along with every other piece of metal I'd had on me. The guard seemed irritated but remained polite. Finally, I was allowed to go through.

It was only later that I connected the strict security procedures at the museum with the terrorist attacks of last September 11. This was my first visit to the Holocaust Museum, and maybe -- probably -- what I had run into was no different from the way things had always been there. But the screening struck me as important and serious in ways that would have been inconceivable before 9/11.

How many times over the years have we gone through metal detectors? How many times have we dumped our change and our pocket knives and our cell phones into plastic trays so they could run through an x-ray machine? There's nothing exactly new about such things. But how often, until this past year, did we really connect such precautions with the possibility that carelessness could kill us, and everyone around us?

In ways that I wouldn't have suspected a year ago, the country has returned to normal. Pop culture is once again as stupid and trivial as it was before 9/11. Vast segments of the news media -- particularly the all-news cable channels -- have resumed their downward spiral into utter irrelevance following a brief uptick in seriousness. But mediated reality is one thing; the actual reality of our daily lives still feels different, suffused with an ill-defined fear and danger that just weren't there before.

Walking through the Holocaust Museum, awakened by the security check, I sensed the danger. Surrounding us was the legacy of anti-Semitism, and of what happens when the veneer of civilization crumbles. September 11 showed us how little really has changed -- that of all the hatreds in the world, hatred of the Jews remains the most potent and the most dangerous, and that Israel and its principal ally, the United States, will not be safe as long as these hatreds run rampant.

Toward the end of our tour, we walked beneath a metal gate emblazoned with the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI -- "Work Brings Freedom," the lie that greeted those arriving at Auschwitz. I wondered what would happen if the museum building came under attack right then. I wondered what I would do. Or what any of us would do.

-- Dan Kennedy

THE SILENT SCREAM
On September 11, 2001, I was eating a
McChicken Sandwich at a McDonald's in Moscow. After ordering a Double Cheeseburger, my travel companion told me that the girl behind the counter said something about the bombing of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The Pentagon? New York? Nah, we thought. She's gotta be mistaken. We chalked it up to the language barrier, to miscommunication due to patchy grammar, to a Russian's limited English vocabulary. We finished our burgers and fries, and left.

Back at the hostel that night, our Swedish roommates talked of hijacked planes and collapsed buildings, of suicide missions and acts of war. Their English was flawless. But we still didn't believe it. We clung to the belief that something was getting lost in the translation.

But on a toaster-oven-size television at the hostel, we watched the images that do not bear description. Russian commentary tumbled over us in a tangle of Slavic sounds. We only understood what we saw, and barely that. But it wouldn't have made any difference if we'd heard it all in English; regardless of the language, none of it made sense. All of it was unspeakable. And, for the most part, remains so.

But that doesn't mean we haven't tried, in the last year, to find words for what happened. The very next day in Moscow, a Russian television station came to the hostel looking for Americans to be part of a studio audience for a live show about responses to the attacks. We went to the station, walked down dimly lit halls with doors labeled in all-caps Cyrillic, and into the studio, where the TV lights made us blink.

We were given ear pieces that would transmit a simultaneous translation. The host of the show, a dark-haired woman named Maria, entered to applause and explained what this special program was about. "Emotional responses," buzzed the translation in our ears. "Let's open up a dialogue, let's have a conversation." Let's talk, in other words. Just 24 hours after the horrific event, expressing ourselves seemed the only option. And still, so it seems, that's the only thing that really satisfies. We've amassed a sturdier foundation for our responses to September 11, but the need to express ourselves as we try to make sense of what happened is just as pressing as it was 12 months ago.

People in the audience spoke of disbelief, of feeling like they were watching a movie, of how the world had been turned on its head. One man stood and said, "It is no surprise what happened. America deserves this."

"Nyet, nyet, nyet," Maria interrupted. "We are here to express feelings, not point fingers. We are trying to find words for grief and fear, not for blame."

People spoke about how the attacks would change America forever, that the US was no longer the country it was 24 hours ago, that this was something from which even the United States could not recover.

I wanted to give an American's perspective. I wanted to say, "Hell yeah, we'll recover." But I couldn't. I was afraid they wouldn't understand, that I wouldn't be able to get across what I wanted them to hear. I'm still struggling with that one year later. We all are.

-- Nina MacLaughlin

A SHARP THING
At the risk of sounding callous or naive, I must say that life hasn't changed much for me in the past year. Other than my blood pressure being a little higher with each new ridiculous W pronouncement -- "axis of evil" or some other silly thing -- my day-to-day operations are much the same. But I did lose my favorite letter opener because of September 11.

I travel fairly often, and have been thoroughly searched roughly 10 times in the past year. It doesn't bother me in the least. The searchers are always friendly, we chat, they're amazed by the video games I carry around with me to amuse myself on the plane. It's almost fun to take my flip-flops off and show them that, indeed, there's nothing taped to the bottom of my foot.

On my 10th frisking, however, I lost my solid-silver letter opener, acquired three years ago in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on a trip I took with my now-wife to celebrate our engagement. You know the type, I'm sure. It's small, heavy with silver, and stamped to prove its authenticity. It opens letters effortlessly. And it never left my leather briefcase for any purpose other than to open letters.

Well, it made it past those well-trained, incredibly astute, and attentive guys manning the x-ray machines nine times. But on my 10th pass-through, one of them paused and started rummaging through my briefcase. Ten minutes later, I asked him what the heck he was looking for.

"Something sharp."

"You mean my letter opener?" I pulled it out of its slot and showed him.

"Yep," he peered over at the x-ray screen. "That's it."

He said I could mail it to myself if I wanted to keep it, otherwise he'd have to confiscate the two-inch-long, totally dull instrument of mail mayhem. Right. I could go back out into the airport, get an envelope, find a place to mail it, then stand in the hourlong line again to get back to my gate. All within 45 minutes of my flight. Sure.

"Well," I said, being laid-back and friendly, "I guess I've got a gift for you. Enjoy it. It's solid silver."

"Thanks," he said. Then he threw it away, right in front of me.

--Sam Pfeifle

A NEW LIFE
Over some frosty mudslides on a sunny September afternoon, John and I decided it was time to make a baby. After 12 fortunate years of late nights, spontaneous weekends, and carefree travel, it was time for us to grow up (at least a little bit) and procreate. On Sunday, September 9, I left a frantic voicemail for my nurse practitioner: I was going off the pill the following day; was there anything special I should know? She called me at work the next morning and told me to take a daily vitamin. She wished us good luck.

The night of the 10th was a long one. All kinds of selfish, I-am-not-sure-I-am-ready thoughts jammed my brain and kept me up all night. I felt like I was stepping off a cliff.

Heading to work the next morning, I stumbled into a local coffee shop for a strong dose of caffeine, annoyed that the radio was blaring Howard Stern. Rose, the manager, yelled something like, "A plane just hit the World Trade Center, and it looks bad. I think we're going to war." And so the day unfolded. That night, I was a different person tossing and turning in bed. Now it all seemed clear and right. What was I so worried about? All those deaths -- it only seemed right to try to create a life. It took six months, but now we have a bun in the oven. She arrives in December. On the days when my distorted body gets in my way and the sight of my favorite foods makes me nauseated, I remind myself just how lucky we are. Sure, the "fun" life we knew is over, but the one we're facing is more exciting and challenging, and after the 11th, a whole lot more meaningful.

-- Liz Matson

AT THE MOVIES
I see a lot of movies. When I say a lot, I mean 60 a year. In the theater. Perhaps that stems from being raised a fundamentalist who saw theaters as "dens of iniquity," as places in which I dared not set foot until I was 15. But from my first guilty matinee on, I was hooked. Film has become one of the primary lenses through which I view our culture. In a darkened movie house, you can chart America's social progress and setbacks alike, from the way previously unacceptable things become more acceptable on the big screen to how our most unyielding prejudices remain embedded in image no matter what the dialogue says. So, of course, I expected to see September 11 throw its shadow into the multiplexes at some point.

Mercifully, movies and movies-of-the-week aren't the same thing, and Hollywood didn't churn out 9/11 movies with the speed of, say, Fox covering the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. We will have to wait awhile for steady doses of Osama-era terrorists and fallen public servants to become blockbuster fare. Yet the events have already altered the visual language of American movies, subtly and poignantly: it's not so much that a shadow is cast over things, but that two very long shadows are missing from view. The Big Apple skyline, so often used as shorthand for prosperity and power, was cropped by the terrorists, who knew all too well that they were knocking down cherished ideas, not just buildings.

At the first post-attack movie I saw set in New York (Zoolander, of all things), I held my breath as the camera swooped along the streets and then upward -- would the towers be there? Up, up, and -- cut. They were gone. I felt like I had been punched. In a mere two weeks, these icons were already ghosts? Later, I would read that the movie had been hastily edited to remove all images of the towers. Other movies -- shot as much as two years before the attacks but only just being released -- quickly followed suit. In so doing, they effectively back-dated the attacks, erasing shining images of the real past in deference to a terrible present.

After that, I went to the movies resigned to the likelihood that the towers wouldn't reappear. When they did show up again, in the finale of Vanilla Sky, they looked so tall, so strong, and so permanent, that I caught my breath. Sadly, as part of the film's elaborate mind game, the New York skyline, including the towers, is not real. Audiences are allowed to see the towers so nakedly because they are an illusion. But I was grateful for the image nonetheless. If it's possible truly to miss two enormous and decidedly unattractive buildings, well, I did. For a moment, the movies had given back what the terrorists took -- until the lights came up, and I returned to a very real and more difficult America.

-- David Valdes Greenwood

ON HOW 9/11 MADE ME NEVER GO TO BED ANGRY
Being in love, from the get-go, has triggered a rash of terror in me. I'm not afraid of "letting go," I'm not afraid of being left (well, okay, a little). I'm primarily concerned with having my boyfriend be run over, mauled, abducted, whatever. September 11 simply added to my fantastical repertoire of terrifying fears.

Now that we're living in New York and coming up on the anniversary of the attacks, I'm afraid his building will be bombed, that he will be in an ill-fated subway car, that -- well, you name it -- and my right brain has been working overtime dreaming up elaborate, sophisticated ways that he could be taken from me. I find myself in terror-ridden reveries, musing on how I'll feel. I look at his shoes lined up neatly beside the bed and fantasize about how weighted with significance they'll be when he's gone. His shoes.

On September 11, I left the Phoenix offices paralyzed, like almost everyone else in this country. I was crying, numb, in shock. My co-worker Seth said goodbye that afternoon with a directive that has echoed through my mind over the past year: "Go home and spend some quality time with your boyfriend."

Roger.

-- Nina Willdorf

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
A year ago, I was locked in a boozy debate with my two hulking uncles -- a recently retired Massachusetts state trooper and a Special Forces reservist. It was a scene we'd enacted many times: me, the liberal punk, as amusing quarry for a tag team of rock-ribbed conservatives -- one who's posted a lovingly framed photo of John Wayne on his wall, and another who relaxes to a cassette of artillery sound effects while driving his flag-emblazoned SUV.

I've never been the bellicose type. And I'd always disagreed, respectfully but vehemently, with my uncles' reactionary beliefs. Even at 15, I clashed with them over the Gulf War, which I couldn't believe George H.W. Bush rationalized so speciously. Their militaristic world-view was antithetical to mine. But something changed last September; by the end of that diabolical day, I agreed with Uncle Marine and Uncle Green Beret. I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt whoever did that just like they hurt us.

Of course, I was hardly the only theretofore-peaceable person who instinctively thirsted for a vicious retort. But I was surprised and a little embarrassed by my about-face. To me, bumper-sticker shibboleths like THESE COLORS DON'T RUN and MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG had always been just that much mindless jingoism. Suddenly, though, I found myself agreeing with them in principle. I love sprawling, heterogeneous, fucked-up America. Right and wrong, this is my country.

Whatever lingering unease I felt about my sudden belligerence vanished when I began poring over the spirited, eloquent arguments put forth each week in the Nation and the Guardian by one of my favorite paragons of political integrity, expat Brit Christopher Hitchens. I'd always subscribed to his vigorous liberalism -- a version that loathed phony Bill Clinton as much as I did while simultaneously skewering the inanities of the knee-jerk left. Hitchens's polemics, mordantly funny and soaked in Johnnie Walker Black, were hugely affirming for me. The September 11 hijackers, he argued, weren't acting on behalf of the world's dispossessed, as some lefties would have it. Simply put, they were "fascists with an Islamic face." He couldn't abide the propitiatory proclamations of the blame-America crowd, "the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." Neither could I. Reading Hitchens's railings in defense of his adopted nation bolstered my conviction that, for all its faults (and they are legion), America offers the world's best example of openness and pluralism -- and that it had to be defended perforce.

One year later, I'm still one of the "hawkish left," as it's sometimes called by those who'd have us accept the immolation of more American civilians because Ronald Reagan's reptilian Central American war games or Clinton's repugnantly self-serving demolition of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant somehow mean we "deserve" it. But if I'm not as "liberal" as I once was, I'm hardly a conservative. Even if I initially, warily, supported the president, I'm now disgusted by how he's gone on to cynically manipulate this crisis for his own political purposes. Same goes for Ashcroft's Orwellian dictates. And I'm still on the fence about Iraq; even the "radical" rationale for invasion just put forth by Hitchens has me unconvinced. But I've never doubted that US soldiers are doing a necessary job in protecting this fine, flawed nation from the continuing threat of Islamic fascism.

This week my 43-year-old uncle leaves his wife and son and ships off with his fellow reservists for a year in Northern Afghanistan. As he does, I think of Hitchens's writing in the Guardian last November: "It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. . . . If, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many, many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too."

-- Mike Miliard

OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM
In the last year, I've learned that the customary "liberal" and "conservative" frameworks don't work anymore. As someone on the left within the spectrum of gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender politics (whatever that means in the world of actual politics these days) I soon found myself, after September 11, having dense, ferocious, usually pointless fights with friends I'd rarely disagreed with before. Suddenly the oddest, but clearly decisive, political litmus tests were applied. For example, I once found myself discussing the complicated question of hate-crimes legislation with a reasonably close friend -- I opposed the legislation as ineffective and something that would only increase the power of a corrupt corrections system -- and he spit out, "Well, I'm not surprised. After all, you're friends with Howard Zinn, and he's in favor of terrorism." I had no answer, as I had only met Howard Zinn once, although he had blurbed my last book. And I do not believe he is in favor of terrorism.

I had the same almost-psychotic sensation of disconnection last week when I told a long-time friend that the program committee I chair, at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, was thinking of holding a panel on Islamic sexualities. He replied: "Islamic sexualities? And what's that -- getting off on killing queers?" While there is much to say about the relationship between any given religion and homosexuality, his immediate and deeply ignorant response to the panel suggestion was disheartening. It wasn't just that the response was anti-Muslim (he actually knows something of the rich history of male-male erotic relationships in Islamic thought and society), but that he was uninterested in considering the possibility that such a discussion might prove fruitful in exploring ideas about homosexuality, a topic in which he is ostensibly quite interested.

I can appreciate that the world has changed, and I can even -- albeit begrudgingly -- make allowances for what I regard as people's irrational panic. It is still deeply upsetting that these mostly irrational positions -- they are hardly arguments -- seem to have taken root. I can understand the spontaneous, if sentimental, gesture of rallying around gay heroes such as Mark Bingham and Father Mychal Judge -- both of whom died in the September 11 attacks -- and I can understand how the attacks instilled a sense of patriotism in lesbians and gay men who always feel like outsiders in mainstream US culture. But I fear that the anxieties of the post-September 11 world are causing many to keep looking to the past in fear, rather than to the future for a new vision.

-- Michael Bronski

9/11 24/7
June 12, 2002, was a day much like this past Labor Day -- gray, rainy, and raw. I wasn't in Boston that day. I was in Hamburg, Germany. I had persuaded my city guide to take me via subway (much like the Red Line from Boston to North Quincy) to the Harburg section of the city. We exited the station and took a taxi, driven by a surly immigrant, to 54 Marienstrasse -- the "House of Followers" -- which had been home to Mohamed Atta, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.

I had expected to find a densely populated immigrant neighborhood with meat shops and mosques on every corner. To my surprise, I found a neighborhood bustling with students; the area looked and felt like Somerville, Massachusetts -- and a gentrified Somerville, at that. We took in the atmosphere with coffee and pastries from a Portuguese café and then caught a cab to Hamburg-Harburg Technical University. I ventured into the student-activities building and knocked on the door of room 10, which had been the Islamic Prayer Room. (It's located across the hall from the Evangelical Christian group and down the hall from the Cameroon Students Society.) As I thought of the terrible events that had been planned on just the other side of the door, my heart raced and my hands trembled.

I was in Germany as a guest of the German government, which frequently invites journalists (and foots the bill for their travel) to tour the country. I ended up writing extensively on the post-September 11 uptick in anti-Semitism in Germany -- one linked to the crisis in the Middle East (see "Heil Hate!", News, June 28). In my travels, I found that what most distinguished me from my German hosts was not the fact that I was Jewish -- the implications of which the Germans seemed fully to comprehend -- but the fact that I was an American who felt the ramifications of September 11 all around me.

On one evening, I had dinner with four European acquaintances, one of whom was the daughter of a former Hungarian Communist apparatchik, from the student section of Berlin. For more than two hours, as my host opened first one and then another bottle of Moldavian rosé (far better than you would expect), we fully engaged in intense conversation about September 11, Afghanistan, and terrorism. Their central question boiled down to this: why does the US just want to bomb? I tried to lay down the arguments in favor of US involvement in Afghanistan and future involvement in Iraq. In return, I heard much about globalism, neo-colonialism, and unilateralism. (Based on their questions, it became obvious to me that the Bush administration had not done a good job of explaining our actions to our allies. Which was no surprise. Do they make things clear to us?) The one point I made again and again is that Americans were attacked that day; I even mentioned that my landlord was a pilot for one of the hijacked planes and was killed. Therefore, the issue for me wasn't so much what we were doing to the rest of the world, but what the rest of the world had already done to us. I reminded them about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the August 1998 African embassy bombings -- events that had barely scratched the surface of their consciousnesses. The dinner ended with goodwill on all sides, and I felt I had done something of at least partial value by articulating the American point of view.

That night, more or less, symbolizes what my life has become since that terrible day in September. I've become an even closer student of US foreign policy than I was before the attacks. And I use my position as an online columnist for this paper to write about US policy and explain why -- contrary to the views of my European friends -- the war against terrorism actually makes sense.

-- Seth Gitell

Issue Date: September 6 - 12, 2002