I heard someone yesterday on the radio say that there are moments that divide time into before and after. Today at Georgetown is day two of the after, our second try at picking up the pieces and the second day we looked at the world from a new angle, the new angle at which we found ourselves after four planes crashed with sufficient force to shift our perspective. Of course, in many ways after is looking a lot like before. The weather is still as beautiful as it was. The radio is back to playing music, and programming other than the news has returned to television. Classes are back in session, Washington, D.C. is back to normal business, Wall Street is scheduled to reopen today, and once again you can hear people laughing on campus.
But in other ways it’s obvious we’re in the after. They are still sifting through rubble in New York and at the Pentagon, they are still looking for answers, and there are still people unaccounted for and there are still people being mourned. The flags are at half-staff today and will be until Sunday. Flights are still limited. We don’t feel safe anymore.
Of course, the greatest marker of the after is that we feel scared and that we feel exposed in a way we never did before. If we lost family or friends, we know the depth of that exposure. If we feared that we had lost family or friends, then we know the extent of the paralysis of dread. If we saw our buildings tumble to the ground, then we know anxiety and powerlessness that we only caught glimpses of in the before.
This feelings come as news to no one. But I don’t think I’m alone in wondering what is going to become of this brand-new after. The divisions between before and after, the in-betweens when we can’t understand where we were and we can’t see where we’re going, are times when the flow of events can change course, can reroute, can take us in new directions or can simply plunge back with renewed zeal into the course previously charted. On day two of after, we are on the brink of war?we may be on the edge of a newer, safer time or we may be in for an extremely difficult time. So what will happen? There has been an icy lump in the pit of my stomach since the after began and the queasy feeling is not terribly unlike vertigo.
When I turned on the TV Tuesday morning and saw the Pentagon burning I felt cold all the way through. Today is the second day of the after, and I’m still shivering. When does after feel like before? I don’t know, and of course it’s too early by far to see to the other side of the state of flux we find ourselves in. I know that eventually we’ll start talking about class material in class again, and the flags will fly normally and the rubble will be cleared away and days and weeks will go by where we don’t think about the events of Tuesday morning. Then we’ll remember what we felt and thought and did in the blindness of the days in between and see it with the clarity we thought we’d left in the before. But when does the true after really start? On day two of our new era, nothing is more unclear.
