IN REAL TIME

I was shocked, my body shaking, as I watched the planes fly into the World Trade on September 11,2001. The carnage and the loss of life, in front of our eyes, casted upon those going to work, flying to various destinations, working in the Pentagon, was as memorable and heinous an act as we can imagine. Then, all eyes on the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, and once again, carnage and loss of life. Runners and spectators mowed down, doing what they had trained to do, or cheering for those who challenged themselves in the doing, were torn apart, limbs lost, naivety gone. Both of these acts were perpetrated upon us by foreign terrorists, although the Boston Bombers had permanent Resident Status of the United States. They paid back those benefits they received from our beloved country with the most heinous of acts. They certainly extracted their “pound of flesh” on the innocent American citizen. Of course, there was another attack on our soil from foreign actors, and that was December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy” according to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. I was not as yet born, but the ramifications were there for all of us…my father and father-in-law went to war, our country had been attacked. These historical moments are etched in our psyche as a nation, and being under attack from those determined to inflict such pain on us is terrifying.

When our own president calls for an attack, there are no words to decry the event…only to lower our heads for a moment, and then to lift them, as we as Americans always do, and label the attack what it was…absolutely heinous! We are not impotent and are not willing to act as if we are.

Wednesday, January 6th was a new “day which will live in infamy.” I was writing an article on emotional health and the Ostomate, having finished a late lunch, my mind attending to the real and demanding emotional and physical challenges many ostomates feel, when my daughter, Alli, called. “Are you watching this?” she asked, her voice tight and worried. “No, Honey, I am writing,” I answered. “Turn on the television, Mom, turn it on.” CNN always set as my default station, my mouth dropped and I yelled, “what is going on?” “They are storming the Capitol, they breached it!” she answered.

The pictures on the television screen were almost impossible to believe, and I kept yelling at Alli, “oh, no, oh, no” as windows were broken by terrorists carrying flagpoles. It was so reminiscent of 9-11, when she, in her apartment in Philadelphia, and me in my home in New Jersey, couldn’t hang up the phone, almost afraid to be disconnected from each other, afraid of what was coming next.

Our country is in a perilous place, and there will be nothing that swiftly changes that. I would like to believe we hit rock bottom on Wednesday, a place where we could go no further down. I would like to believe that there will be a coming together now because we have too much to lose as we continue down this path. It was not foreign bad actors who hurt us this time. These were homegrown pain providers. Apparently, we are good at growing those who wish to do harm to their fellow citizens, our places of pride, our symbols of democracy.

Figuring out how to move ahead may come down to acting as the centipede when asked how he knows which leg to move next? Each of us has a different need, a different thought, a different desire. But at the end of the day, we are one country, and that is what has kept “We, the People,” coalesced. The only way we may be able to move forward may just be like the centipede…one leg at a time.