We're All on the Same Page

There is no point pretending that I am any different than you just because I happen to be on this side of the news page.

I am numbed, angry, sickened, diminished; none the wiser for having filled up a notebook in the process of witnessing this first week in what everyone seems to agree is a new age, a new kind of war against ghosts.

I have question fatigue. Why is this happening? What should be done? Who do we punish? How do we not kill innocents in the process? What do our enemies want? Are they hoping we kill innocents? The better for winning recruits to their cause? What is their cause?

I feel anxious and guilty - more so whenever I turn off the TV, and most of all when I am not in the city of New York.

New York is a smaller city than it was just a week ago. It seems older and hobbled. I have never seen it like this. You see people crying in the street. As ubiquitous as the cell phone was, it is now more so, as if the people were always keeping touch with the ones they love. You see them often acting unpredictably: cheering fighter planes that cruise overhead. Filming each other with hand-held video cameras. Applauding sanitation trucks.

There are signs of the old exuberance - two bare-chested young men hurling a baseball up and back on a deserted Seventh Avenue Wednesday afternoon, for example - but the city that never sleeps, for now, has a look of madness and insomnia about it.

In newspaper school they teach you to remain objective. You are supposed to present the readers a set of facts in descending order, from the most - to the least - important detail.

But let terrorists make missiles of hijacked commercial jets filled with innocent people, and send them to blow up your hometown and the nation's capital for good measure, and the wall between writer and reader and story gets pretty thin.

We all more or less read from the same page here. Every story we scan is of maximum emergency importance: Every murdered firefighter and police officer, each army general, legal secretary, receptionist, commissioner, broker, cook and cleaner, lawyer, technician, father and mother and child of someone. Which of these is most and which is least, buried in the concrete?

They all died for being American. For being in America. For being at work.

Every implication of the story is maximal. I cannot tell you which goes first: The certainty that seems to be in the heart of the enemy - about who we are, and what we "mean." The uncertainty that seems at the heart of us - about who, what and where to fight. The vulnerability of us. The hate in them, whoever they are.

Which of these is the most and which is the least important implication?

It seems arbitrary that the terrorists chose to attack certain symbols of American power and not the one in which you or I happen to earn a living; and maybe our symbol is next on the list. But I know, as you know, it could have been me or you on Tuesday. They would rejoice no less in the kill.

So in solidarity with the dead, I have kept the TV on, read every word I could, and since the cataclysm, gone to the city as often as possible. It seems the least thing to do - not just because of my job, or my sense of duty, or the excellent service of the railroad.

I want the city to thrive. And I find comfort in being there. I felt lucky, in a way, that my job made it possible to go on the weekdays.

New York happens to be my hometown. I have a lot of warm feelings about the place and a lot more visceral anger at the attack than I would have thought possible.

But you don't have to be raised in lower Manhattan, as I was, to feel strongly for this city of the most watchable people and great food and hot tickets and a thousand languages.

Within a dozen blocks of the acreage that would later become the World Trade Center, I attended public school with Americans from all the continents. We were black and white, Asian and Hispanic, Southern European, Jewish, Christian, Muslims and Ukrainian - namely my friend Walter, who turned red with anger if you mistakenly called him a Russian. You learned a little something about the world in a neighborhood like that.

I am proud of that place. That's my city. This is my country. I am no different than you, in other words. Horrified beyond words.

If I have my peccadillos - for recoiling at the flag-waving frenzy of the past few days, for instance. Or for resenting the religious sermons I had to endure Friday in order to observe my country's day of mourning. Why all the praying? Why not a gathering at the Capitol? - that is why I am an American and not a citizen of a lesser country.

They allow questions here.

They allow members of the press to say what they think, even if it is: What is going on here? Can someone please say?

Related topic galleries: Terrorism