Just over a week ago, I traveled to Washington D.C. for the weekend. It was a short trip: I left on Friday and returned 48 hours later to try and study for my midterms. I went to the nation’s capital to see friends and do a little work. I was not afraid to fly, but I wrote my flight numbers on the whiteboard for my roommates anyway. I certainly didn’t expect to find fodder for a column, but I did.
As I was waiting in O’Hare, I watched national guardsmen pacing the terminal with M-16s slung over their shoulders and baggage screeners emptying the bags of fellow passengers. I used my ID more often that afternoon than I do on a Saturday night. Bizarrely, I also spent some time on the phone getting details on the anthrax scare here at home that would prove to be just that: a scare. I realized, this is the new normal.
After a couple of hours in Chicago and a delay due to a broken radar part, we departed for Washington Dulles. On the plane I wondered what would happen to someone who chose to wander toward the cockpit; how bad would their beating be?
When we landed, I noticed that the guardsmen at Dulles were pacing around with their machine guns in hand, rather than casually slung over their shoulders. In the baggage claim I met Keith, who was there to pick me up for the 45-minute drive into the city. A nice man (and a former cop), Keith told me he had spent the afternoon taking people to memorial services for those killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
The next day’s meetings required me to crisscross the district and parts of Virginia — I spent a lot of time in cabs. During four separate cab rides over the course of the day, the drivers went out of their way to strike up a conversation with me on America’s new war. None of these men seemed to have been born in the United States, as each had a strong foreign accent, but this certainly didn’t hold them back. Each one had some choice words to offer the terrorists who attacked New York and their hometown. One even suggested that when we catch bin Laden, we should tie him to the Washington Monument and let dogs tear him apart. The city of Washington is suffering, and the city of Washington is angry.
That evening on the way to dinner I passed the White House, only to see more men with guns, this time pacing on the grounds and the roof. I met some friends at a restaurant on Capitol Hill near where I lived this summer.
At the intersection of 3rd and C Streets NE were red flares and a couple of police officers. This setup continued in a perimeter around the U.S. Capitol and the surrounding blocks, meant to keep any unauthorized vehicles away from the building. I felt like walking towards the capitol but didn’t feel like being interrogated by police, so I just kept going.
After dinner I took the Metro (D.C.’s subway) to meet another friend for a drink. On that weekend the Metro was free in an effort to attract the suburbanites of Maryland and Virginia back to the besieged city — the next morning I read in the Post that the effort had failed.
Sunday morning Keith was back to return me to Dulles. On the way he told me he had been to the athletic club that morning and had his bag searched on the way in. The guy in front of him had his bottle of baby powder confiscated. I was sharing with Keith some of my observations from the weekend when he turned to me and said: ?You’re from Madison, right? Are you guys dealing with any of this??
The answer was no.
For more than 20 years our city has been described as a unique area, surrounded by reality. This has never been more true. In cities across this nation, especially New York and Washington, Americans are living with feelings of unprecedented remorse, anger and fear.
Here in Madison we have the luxury of being relatively insignificant and can therefore carry on with our intellectual debates and activists movements free from the pain of terrorism. In our city, the pain of our neighbors who lost family and friends is drowned out by extremists on campus and, more notably, on the school board. On our island our sense of safety and civil liberties is still intact.
So, should we be proud of our neighbors who take this sanctuary for granted? No, but we should be thankful that we are here with them, on our island, where our suffering amounts to that caused by a wayward School Board, a false anthrax scare and the usual crowd on Library Mall.
Joe Alexander ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in business and political science.