Familiar Story

Masha Gessen has an archive post on her blog - an article she wrote in New York City on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. It presents, from a European and Russian perspective, some thoughts on America and Americans. Some of her observations have the hard ring of truth about them:

The attacked is always the last to know. Americans, who generally—sometimes with good reason—smugly believe that they know all they need to know are, perhaps for the first time, feeling what it is to be in the middle of a story they do not understand. How humiliating it is to be reduced to feeding on rumor, hearsay and mythologized interpretations of real and imaginary clues: was the date—9-11—coincidental? could the choice of American Airlines as the murder weapon have been symbolic? How frightening it is suddenly to feel unable to distinguish the credible from the impossible—now that the unimaginable has happened. How enervating it is to know that someone, somewhere knows exactly what happened, how it was done, and what will happen next—while droves of competent journalists and officials are scrambling to count the casualties and gather clues from the possible apprehension of a van filled with explosives on the George Washington Bridge or a supposed car bomb outside the State Department.

This is familiar, as are many other things I see in New York on September 11: the mobbed stores, the suddenly unreliable phone lines, the streets eerily still after dark, the harried waitresses at cafes filled with people in a state of enforced idleness that, for lack of a frame of reference, appears festive. This is all familiar, but it is not the universal experience of war. Nor is the loss of loved ones or of property or of a measure of freedom. The universal experience of war is losing one’s sense of security—usually for good. When I hear that the twin towers have collapsed, I catch myself thinking that now New Yorkers—like the residents of Belgrade, Beirut or Baghdad—will have a daily reminder, a broken tooth in the skyline saying, “It has happened here. It could happen again. To you.” New Yorkers, and perhaps Americans in general, have lost their sense of security, their innocence, their belief in seatbelts. This is a tragedy. But there is a little gloating voice inside me saying, “Now you know.” Well, I have a grudge.

Read the whole thing.