FOR A MOMENT there, the terrorists had won. I had let them win.
I was listening to the car radio when I heard the news from Oklahoma City, and I thought: "This is not my country." I thought: "This is not the country I grew up in."That is just what the terrorists would have me do - push my own country away, disavow my intimacy with it and thus cede to them just the smallest room for emotional maneuver; cede them, if you will, crawl space for their evil.
But of course this is my country.
The difference, now, is that my country lives in a world where anyone excited by what he believes to be a grievance believes, too, that as a result he has a right to murder people who have no role in it; who in fact are utterly unoffending.
Not even someone harboring a murderous grudge against the United States, as some abstract, vaguely national offender, could possibly extend culpability to small children whose little faults lie on this world as lightly as down.
So this is my country, and all the more for each of the 60 years I have given to living in it. No terrorist, cause-bitten and afoam, can blow me into estrangement from it, can detonate me into an indifferent privacy that would deny the bond - no one can, that is, unless I give him leave to do so.
I give none leave.
The dead and hurt in Oklahoma City are my friends and they are my neighbors. They are friends I have not yet met, neighbors among whom I'm still to live. We belong to one another, if not in familiarity then in anticipation.
After the bombing at the World Trade Center in New York and now after this, we cannot know what lies ahead for us in this world of new hurts.
Whatever the worst is that zealots or madmen wish for us, their gravest wants will be blunted at least, and even their breaches eased, if we draw into common purpose against them.
A people watching out for one another cannot be invulnerable, but are surely strengthened by a wary and caring commonality.
So, although I would rather not, I must tell you this:
As I drove home that evening, scanning the radio for the latest news, I came upon a dunce. He is a talkmeister, as they are called, and he was raging on about "President Sissy."
Brave men were crawling through the ruins, he said, searching at their peril for survivors, but "President Sissy" was "hiding in the White House." He was "taking a meeting," "President Sissy" was.
No explosive terrorism is damaging us thoroughly as is the quiet terrorism by which we practice routines of contempt for our public institutions and a pattern of denigration of the men and women who, however imperfectly, occupy them to their best ability.
A people who have fallen to a cynicism that sees their own government as their surest enemy - the premise souring our public life and driving our politics - are in silent array with a terrorism that, after all, heartily agrees with them.