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bones the sole remains, eerily beautiful in asymmetry, as if a new work of 
abstract art had been erected in a public space. Elsewhere, you see the 
transformation of institutions: The New School and New York University are 
missing persons' centers. A  movie house is now a rest shelter, a Burger King 
a first-aid center, a Brooks Brothersâ?? clothing store a body parts morgue, 
a record shop a haven for stranded animals.  Libraries are counseling 
centers. Ice rinks are morgues. A bank is now a supply depot: in the first 
four days, it distributed 11,000 respirators and 25,000 pairs of protective 
gloves and suits. Nearby, a mobile medical unit housed in a Macdonald's has 
administered 70,000 tetanus shots. The brain tries to process the numbers: 
"only" 50,000 tons of debris had been cleared by  yesterday, out of 1.2 
million tons. The medical examiner's office has readied up to 20,000 DNA 
tests for unidentifiable cadaver parts. At all times, night and day, a 
minimum of 1000 people live and work on the site.

Such numbers daze the mind. It's the details--fragile, individual--that melt 
numbness into grief. An anklet with "Joyleen" engraved on it--found on an 
ankle. Just that: an ankle. A pair of hands--one brown, one white\clasped   
together. Just that. No wrists. A burly welder who drove from Ohio to help, 
saying softly, "We're working in a cemetery. I'm standing in--not on, in--a 
graveyard."  Each lamppost, storefront, scaffolding, mailbox, is plastered 
with homemade photocopied posters, a racial/ethnic rainbow of faces and 
names: death the great leveler, not only of the financial CEOs--their images 
usually formal, white, male, older, with suit-and-tie--but the mailroom 
workers, receptionists, waiters. You pass enough of the MISSING posters and 
the faces, names, descriptions become familiar. The Albanian window-cleaner 
guy with the bushy eyebrows. The teenage Mexican dishwasher who had an 
American flag tattoo. The janitor's assistant who'd emigrated from Ethiopia. 
The Italian-American grandfather who was a doughnut-cart tender. The 
23-year-old Chinese American junior pastry chef at the Windows on the World 
restaurant who'd gone in early that day so she could prep a business 
breakfast for 500. The  firefighter who'd posed jauntily wearing his green 
shamrock necktie. The dapper African-American midlevel manager with a small 
gold ring in his ear who handled "minority affairs" for one of the companies. 
The middle-aged secretary laughing up at the camera from her wheelchair. The 
maintenance worker with a Polish name, holding his newborn baby. Most of the 
faces are smiling; most of the shots are family photos;  many are recent 
wedding pictures. . . .

I have little national patriotism, but I do have a passion for New York, 
partly for our gritty, secular energy of endurance, and because the world 
does come here: 80 countries had offices in the Twin Towers; 62 countries 
lost citizens in the catastrophe; an estimated 300 of our British cousins 
died, either in the planes or the buildings. My personal comfort is found not 
in ceremonies or prayer services but in watching the plain, truly heroic (a 
word usually misused) work of ordinary New Yorkers we take for granted every 
day, who have risen to this moment unpretentiously, too busy even to notice 
they're expressing the splendor of the human spirit: firefighters, medical 
aides, nurses, ER doctors, police officers, sanitation workers, 
construction-workers, ambulance drivers, structural engineers, crane 
operators, rescue worker "tunnel rats" . . .

Meanwhile, across the US, the rhetoric of retaliation is in full-throated 
roar. Flag sales are up. Gun sales are up. Some radio stations have banned 
playing John Lennon's song, "Imagine." Despite appeals from all officials 
(even Bush), mosques are being attacked, firebombed; Arab Americans are 
hiding their  children indoors; two murders in Arizona have already been 
categorized as hate   crimes--one victim a Lebanese-American man and one a 
Sikh man who died merely for wearing a turban. (Need I say that there were 
not nationwide attacks against white Christian males after Timothy McVeigh 
was apprehended for the Oklahoma City bombing?)

Last Thursday, right-wing televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (our
home-grown American Taliban leaders) appeared on Robertson's TV show "The 700 
Club," where Falwell blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the 
feminists and the gays and lesbians ... the American Civil Liberties Union, 
People for the American Way" and groups "who have tried to secularize 
America" for what occurred in New York. Robertson  replied, "I totally 
concur." After even the Bush White House called the remarks "inappropriate," 
Falwell apologized (though he did not take back his sentiments); Robertson 
hasn't even apologized. (The program is carried by the Fox Family  Channel, 
recently purchased by the Walt Disney Company--in case you'd like to register 
a protest.)

The sirens have lessened. But the drums have started. Funeral drums. War 
drums. A State of Emergency, with a call-up of 50,000 reservists to active 
duty. The Justice Department is seeking increased authority for wider 
surveillance, broader detention powers, wiretapping of persons (not, as 
previously, just phone numbers), and stringent press restrictions on military 
reporting.

And the petitions have begun. For justice but not vengeance. For a reasoned
response but against escalating retaliatory violence. For vigilance about 
civil liberties. For the rights of innocent Muslim Americans.  For 
â??bombingâ??
Afghanistan with food and medical parcels, NOT firepower. There will be the
expectable peace marches, vigils, rallies. . . . One member of the House of
Representatives--Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, an African American
woman--lodged the sole vote in both houses of  Congress against giving Bush
broadened powers for a war response, saying she didn't believe  a massive
military campaign would stop terrorism. (She could use letters of support:
email her, if you wish, at >>barbara.lee at mail.house.gov<<.)

Those of us who have access to the media have been trying to get a different
voice out. But ours are complex messages with long-term solutions--and this
is a moment when people yearn for simplicity and short-term, facile answers.

Still, I urge all of you to write letters to the editors of newspapers, call 
in to talk radio shows, and, for those of you who have media access--as 
activists, community leaders, elected or appointed officials, academic 
experts, whatever--to do as many interviews and TV programs as you can. Use 
the tool of the Internet. Talk about the root causes of terrorism, about the 
need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in 
its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people's despair over 
ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need 
to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; 
the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions--empathy--for "the 
other";  the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to 
reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious 
fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand 
that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we 
conceive of excitement, eroticism, and  "manhood";  the need to comprehend 
that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it  thrivesalong 
a spectrum, as do its effects--from the battered child and raped woman who 
live in fear to an entire populace living in fear.

Meanwhile, we cry and cry and cry. I don't even know who my tears are for
anymore, because I keep seeing ghosts, I keep hearing echoes.

The world's sympathy moves me deeply. Yet I hear echoes dying into silence: 
the world averting its attention from Rwandaâ??s screams . . . 

Ground Zero is a huge mass grave. And I think: Bosnia. Uganda.

More than 6300 people are missing and presumed dead (not even counting
the Washington and Pennsylvania deaths). The TV anchors choke up: civilians,
they say, my god, civilians. And I see ghosts. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden.
Vietnam.

I watch the mask-covered mouths and noses on the street turn into the
faces of Tokyo citizens who wear such masks every day against toxic pollution.
I watch the scared eyes become the fearful eyes of women forced to wear
the hajib or chodor or burka against their will . . .

I stare at the missing posters' photos and think of the Mothers of the 
Disappeared, circling the plazas in Argentina. And I see the ghosts of other
faces. In photographs on the walls of Holocaust museums. In newspaper
clippings from Haiti. In chronicles from Cambodia . . .

I worry for people who've lost their homes near the site, though I see
how superbly social-service agencies are trying to meet their immediate and
longer-term needs. But I see ghosts: the perpetually homeless who sleep
on city streets, whose needs are never addressed. . . .

I watch normally unflappable New Yorkers flinch at loud noises, parents
panic when their kids are late from school. And I see my Israeli feminist
friends like Yvonne, whoâ??ve lived with this dread for decades and still 
(even
yesterday) stubbornly issue petitions insisting on peace. . . .

I watch sophisticates sob openly in the street, people who've lost 
workplaces, who don't know where their next paycheck will come from, who fear 
a contaminated water or food supply, who are afraid for their sons in the 
army, who are unnerved by security checkpoints, who are in mourning, who are 
wounded, who feel humiliated, outraged. And I see my friends like Zuhira  in 
the refugee camps of Gaza or West Bank, Palestinian women who have lived in 
precisely that same emotional condition--for four generations.

Last weekend, many Manhattanites left town to visit concerned families,
try to normalize, get away for a break. As they streamed out of the city, I 
saw
ghosts of other travelers: hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees streaming
toward their country's borders in what is to them habitual terror, trying to
escape a drought-sucked country so war-devastated there's nothing left to
bomb, a country with 50,000 disabled orphans and two million widows whose
sole livelihood is begging; where the life expectancy of men is 42 and women
40; where women hunch in secret whispering lessons to girl children forbidden
to go to school, women who risk death by beheading--for teaching a child to
read.

The ghosts stretch out their hands. Now you know, they weep, gesturing
at the carefree, insulated, indifferent, golden innocence that was my 
country's
safety, arrogance, and pride. Why should it take such horror to make you
see? the echoes sigh, Oh please do you finally see?

This is calamity. And opportunity. The United States--what so many of
you call America--could choose now to begin to understand the world. And
join it. Or not.


For now my window still displays no flag, my lapel sports no 
red-white-and-blue ribbon. Instead, I weep for a city and a world. Instead, I 
cling to a different loyalty, affirming my un-flag, my un-anthem, my 
un-prayer--the defiant un-pledge of a madwoman who also had mere words as her 
only tools in a time of ignorance and carnage, Virginia Woolf: "As a woman I 
have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the 
whole world."

If this is treason, may I be worthy of it.

In mourning--and in absurd, tenacious hope,

Robin Morgan
September 18, 2001
New York City

Robin Morgan is an award-winning writer, feminist leader, political theorist, 
journalist, and activist. She has published 17 books, including six of 
poetry, two of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies SISTERHOOD IS 
POWERFUL (Random House/Vintage Books, 1970), and SISTERHOOD IS GLOBAL 
(Doubleday/Anchor, l984; Feminist Press edition 1996), and her own acclaimed 
THE DEMON LOVER; ON THE SEXUALITY OF TERRORISM (Norton, 1989). Her newest 
book of poetry is A HOT JANUARY: POEMS 1996-1999 (Norton, 1999), and her 
memoir, SATURDAY'S CHILD was recently published (Norton, December 2000).