CAIRO - Where were you at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001?
I was sitting cross-legged in the corner of my high school's atrium, reading about feudal society for history class. I remember reading that morning about something called the Truce of God, an attempt by the church to control violence in medieval Europe by forbidding warfare from sundown on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday. It was a Tuesday.
A few minutes later, I got up and went to math class. An hour later, we were told that we needed to gather for a special assembly. Something had happened. The Twin Towers were going down.
That afternoon, I went downtown on the Metro to buy my monthly student farecard. I've never seen the Washington, D.C., subway system so deserted in all my life. There were only a handful of people on the train, most of them with suitcases, headed to Union Station, hoping to take a train out of town. They couldn't. The trains were shut down. So was the farecard window. I went home and e-mailed friends in Manhattan and watched cable news. I didn't stop watching for a few days.
What I remember most is the uncertainty. We didn't know what would happen tomorrow, or next week. Was there a second wave of attacks coming? We were told to stockpile water and food in our school lockers, in case we had to shelter in place. We attacked Afghanistan and waited for the other shoe to drop.
My fear is nothing compared to that of soldiers under fire or those whose lives are torn apart by poverty and war, but it is still there, a dull pain, insidious. In the spring of 2003, the terror alert was raised to orange three times. My parents bought my brother and me cell phones so we could stay in contact during an attack. We invaded Iraq and braced for Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons to be unleashed. We were told that the next attack was a question of when, not if. We stocked potassium iodine tablets and waited for the dirty bombs to explode.
We were scared, and we were kept scared, with vague warnings of future attacks and "terror plots" that, after a few days, looked more like they came out of a Marx Brothers movie than an al-Qaida training camp. Our fear is useful to our leaders. "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear," wrote Edmund Burke, the British statesman and namesake of my high school, in 1756. Our Congress gathered together to sing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol, then passed war resolutions and the USA Patriot Act. We stood mute, nodding slightly, just wanting to feel safe again.
We hate what we fear. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that hate crimes against Muslims in the United States numbered about 30 a year. In 2001, there were almost 500. That number dropped again to about 150 in 2002, where it's stayed since then. We can tell ourselves that our nation's hate, like its fear, is elevated but manageable, like an alcoholic's drinking. We have it under control.
I felt helpless on that clear day in 2001. That afternoon, I stood on the eerily silent platform at the Metro Center station and tried to understand what was going on. The smoke was rising across the river at the Pentagon, while firefighters hung an enormous American flag over the wall. I visited Ground Zero for the first time that winter and saw the sky wrenchingly empty. I've gotten better at hiding my fear - all of us have. But it's still there.
The taproot of fear is ignorance. Pundits who wouldn't know the Prophet Muhammad from a shawarma tell us that we should nuke Mecca and convert the Arabs. More rational people fear terrorism because they don't understand what, if anything, they did to deserve this. How do you get into the mind of a suicide bomber? Do you really want to?
If we fear what we don't understand, then I want to understand, because I don't want to be afraid any more. Five years and almost 6,000 miles away from that day, I'm sitting in Cairo, studying Arabic and Middle East politics here for the semester. I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to understand this region and our war here, as a student and as a reporter.
I tell myself that I want to do that because this is the story of our generation, and it has to be told. But it's really because I need to know what's going on. Maybe if I know what's happening, I won't be scared anymore. But I know that I will.
Ben Leubsdorf '08 is a former senior staff writer and Metro Editor at The Herald.
