Someone over at the Slipstream posted this and I thought some of you might gain some comfort from it:

Ian McEwan
Saturday September 15, 2001
The Guardian

Emotions have their narrative; after the shock we move inevitably to the grief, and the sense that we are doing it more or less together is one tiny scrap of consolation.
Initially, the visual impact of the scenes - those towers collapsing with malign majesty - extended our state of fevered astonishment. Even on Wednesday, fresh video footage froze us in this stupefied condition, and denied us our profounder feelings: the first plane disappearing into the side of the tower as cleanly as a posted letter; the couple jumping into the void, hand in hand; a solitary figure falling with a strangely extended arm (was it an umbrella serving as a hopeful parachute?); the rescue workers crawling about at the foot of a vast mountain of rubble.

In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. Sheer amazement kept getting in the way.

The reckoning, of course, was with the personal. By Thursday I noticed among friends, and in TV and radio commentaries, a new mood of exhaustion and despair. People spoke of being depressed. No other public event had cut so deeply. The spectacle was over. Now we were hearing from the bereaved. Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. This was what it was always really about.

The silent relatives grouped around the entrances to hospitals or wandering the streets with their photographs was a terrible sight. It reminded us of other tragedies, of wars and natural disasters around the world. But Manhattan is one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and there were some uniquely modern elements to this nightmare that bound us closer to it.

The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. Now, in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. All through Thursday we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls. Whatever the immediate circumstances, what was striking was what they had in common. A new technology has shown us an ancient, human universal.

A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again.We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.

Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and venerable - Henry James, Nelson, Goethe - recorded, and perhaps sometimes edited for posterity, by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance, or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. But these last words spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.

They compel us to imagine ourselves into that moment. What would we say? Now we know.

Most of us have had no active role to play in these terrible events. We simply watch the television, read the papers, turn on the radio again. Listening to the analysts and pundits is soothing to some extent. Expertise is reassuring. And the derided profession of journalism can rise quite nobly, and with immense resource, to public tragedy.

However, I suspect that in between times, when we are not consuming news, the majority of us are not meditating on recent foreign policy failures, or geopolitical strategy, or the operational range of helicopter gunships.

Instead, we remember what we have seen, and we daydream helplessly. Lately, most of us have inhabited the space between the terrible actuality and these daydreams. Waking before dawn, going about our business during the day, we fantasize ourselves into the events. What if it was me?

This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless. You have very little time before some holy fool, who believes in his place in eternity, kicks in the door, slaps your head and orders you back to your seat. 23C. Here is your seat belt. There is the magazine you were reading before it all began.

The banality of these details might overwhelm you. If you are not already panicking, you are clinging to a shred of hope that the captain, who spoke with such authority as the plane pushed back from the stand, will rise from the floor, his throat uncut, to take the controls...

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. As for their victims in the planes and in the towers, in their terror they would not have felt it at the time, but those snatched and anguished assertions of love were their defiance.

© Ian McEwan, 2001

Dear Friends:
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most
brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he
talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we
are in. --Gary T.

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage.

What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing
whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I
am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've
never
lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will
listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt
in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New
York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant
psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997.
Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban,
think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think
"the
people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."

It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity.
They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if
someone
would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of
international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these
widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the
farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons
why
the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses?
Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from
medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and
hide.

Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans,
they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying
over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the
criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making
common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people
they've been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true
fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in
there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do
what
needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as
many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about
killing
innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand.

What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because
some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin
Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any
troops
to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not
likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first.
Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're
flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he
wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all
right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might
seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam
and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.

If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people
with
nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view.
He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would
mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just
theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

**********

The personal stories and emotions are what are so hard to take right now...

I pray for each and every one of them.

{{{{{{Kendaa}}}}}} Thank you for sharing that.

Shhh,
Whisper

Yes indeed - you know, I feel so torn, really, as I imagine a great many are feeling. One part of me - the enraged, OUTraged part, would very much like to see the b*stards nuked back to the stone age, but there's a much stronger part of me, the part that knows I'm a healer and that what I do best is love people, and that IS best in people is our love that knows that doing that just isn't the right thing either. And this article you posted, bless him - he says it far better than I ever could.

I fear the world stands at a terrible crossroads.

that's a good way of saying it. I personally want the bastards to pay, but I don't want innocent people to pay. How do we go about doing that?!

There were war protestors on the plaza yesterday (10 miles from my house). They held signs that said, "President Bush, Give Peace A Chance!" I was dumbfounded, give peace a chance?! What the hell do they think the world has been doing? God help us.

We've given peace a world of chances; now is our chance to give the world some peace!

Shhh,
Whisper

And yet, angels whisper in my ear, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." And that message also seems clear...

it's good to read them again, I think.

We can't bomb Afghanistan into the stone age because it's already there. And I don't want missles or whatever thrown at people for the sake of throwing bombs.

I think Bush said something lke he wouldn't send a billion dollar missile to destroy a $10.00 tent or hit some camel in the ass! I think that's very well said! A smile amidst the other stuff.