March 23, 2002

 mfinley.com   
"Lost Luggage"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2002 by Michael Finley

(Note: This one's not for the squeamish.)

I have hardly been able to write the past six months. I no longer get funny ideas to write about, the way I used to. I remember the late night comics in September, asking audiences how they could possibly go on. Well, they went on fine, having sponsors. I'm still stuck.

The ideas I do get, seem to follow the same dull plod of so many others. And I ask myself, what's the use of writing something out that isn’t original? And even if an idea were original, that's would be bad, too: "The world is in flames, and you’re being original."

I have to beat this thing, and I'm not certain how to do it. If I say what I've been thinking, I reveal the depth of my post-traumatic stress, my weakness. If I say something else, I'm whistling past the graveyard, avoiding the unthinkable thought that is on everyone's mind. Of the two choices, which is less neurotic?

I've been scared. Horrified actually. Of the end of America. It reminds me, for all my criticism of the current regime, how useless I would be if I were in charge.

The day of the attacks, I immediately went to the worst possible scenario. It was so bad, we couldn't even surrender. Hitler would at least have accepted our surrender, though who knows what he would have done afterward. These fellows just want us to die. And it's not even their idea, it's God's. God is evidently telling them to do these things. Way to go, God. 

It's not that I have such great confidence in these people. The shoe bomb makes clear that their implementation is spotty. But when they did what they did, the cat got out of the bag. Anyone can mix fertilizer, or walk into a crowded restaurant, or rent a locker in a train station. And if they are willing to die to make a point, and there are a million them, and only a handful are supremely confident and cool ... well, you do the math.

The night after the attacks, I dreamed that I was standing on the sledding hill in Highland Park, underneath the twin aqua water towers. It's a place I often took my kids in the winter, though they were not with me in the dream. 

And as I looked east, I saw a flash hundreds of miles away, and knew it was Madison, Wisconsin going up in a bright sheet of nuclear lightning. It was so far away, but I knew a beautiful city, a university town, had died in a moment. 

Then missiles streaked by us. The explosion was silent. When I looked up, the sky was gray and my city had wilted away. The tops of everything were twisted and black. The aqua towers were just black stems sticking up, smoke twitching from them like a discarded cigarette.

Then I thought, where are my kids? The chill that overtook me was so powerful that I woke up, gasping.

The thing is, we can muster a terrific homeland security effort. We can patrol every inch of coastline. We can stand guard over chemical plants and nuclear installations. We can monitor for missiles and suicide planes. We can reorder into a society of watchdogs, twenty four seven.

But can we do this for twenty or fifty or a hundred years? Doesn't something happen at some point, something so awful we know in a moment we can't win this kind of war, in which the goal is to discourage with mass deaths, to kill our culture, to injure us deep in our souls. Think of the shock the September 11 attack was to us, and multiply that by a thousand. How do we stiffen our resolve after that? What do we do once we've stiffened it?

In a world in which countries like Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and countries like the USSR give going-out-of-business sales of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons eventually get detonated.

I think of suitcase bombs, and I wonder how many of them our country can endure before we break up as surely as Somalia, Afghanistan, or Lebanon. In a world of suitcase bombs, luggage gets lost.

My wife thinks I've gone over the deep end, and of course she's right. I'm not doing anyone any good with these perturbations. Especially our kids, who have to live in this world. 

There are moments when being vaporized in a nanosecond doesn't seem like such a bad outcome to a process already noteworthy for its mortality. But of course, the real victims of September 11 were not the people who looked out the window and saw the gray shapes drawing rapidly near. Their suffering was short. But the city around them, a city of remarkable character and resilience, will suffer for generations from the fright of it. 

In the future, I expect my city to suffer, too. 

When I was a kid in the 1950s, we lived with the daily thought that the Russians might launch a hydrogen bomb attack on us in northern Ohio. They had targeted my little town of quarries and greenhouses. I did not think of the disease and chaos and pain following such an attack. Just the many lights in the sky as the missiles approached, and me hunkering under my half-inch of formica desktop.

And at least we had the 15 minutes of thoughtfulness, as the missile blips drew closer to ground zero. In the case of suitcase bombs, there will be no radar blips. No moment to amass meaning, and embrace one's beloved. Just, suddenly, things change.

It makes me wonder if I was a heel to have kids. And I always disdained people who had that attitude, as cowards, or negativists. But now I wonder if the gift of life I gave them was a cruelty. It does not take too long for this kind of thinking to metamorphose into the despair that that woman in Texas must have felt, before she led her little ones out the door.

I look around at my city and it seems so beautiful to me. Garrison Keillor once called Saint Paul the most beautiful place in the world, if you caught it just right, and were standing in just the right spot. By all measures it is a moderate, clean, virtuous place, never mind that it is home to the state legislature.

There are evenings when the sun sets on the Mississippi and the chalky cliffs of Saint Paul shout back at the dying light, as if to say, we're giving it a go here where the rivers join and we all join together in life and in love. Parents love their children as much here as any place in the world. 

In so many ways we are a positive people, kind at heart, and considerate of one another. We're all committed to this patch of dirt, and we have built hospitals to welcome the new people in, and to usher the old people out. It almost, if you catch it just right, and are standing in the right spot, makes sense. 

And yet, our sister city is Nagasaki. We know things go wrong. Asteroids miss the earth for a long time, and then they don't miss. Luggage you thought you had sent ahead shows up at your door, and it has found you.

We used to say the living would envy the dead. But it isn’t even close. It is true a thousandfold. Consider what would happen to the economy alone in the event of a nuclear detonation in an American (or European, or Japanese, or Australian) city. Usually when there is destruction, capitalism goes to work and creates opportunities for the survivors. Look at the resurrection of San Francisco, or Europe and the Marshal Plan.

But there is no rebuilding a city that has been poisoned for 100,000 years. There is not much that can be done for the cities in the path of prevailing winds. The bible speaks of weeping and the gnashing of teeth, and the scorching of the plains, and the doors of paradise gated for seven times seven generations. 

How many of us think our jobs will still be there for us the day after a nuclear attack? What are the economics of that immense a hit to our confidence? How many widgets will the world want the next day? How many of us will go out to eat? 

I am in a panic for my kids. Not only must my son and daughter fear being vaporized by people who think the world will be purer without their little faces. But until that curious moment they must factor in epidemics, the threat of intimacy, anthrax in the mail, virus attacks, identity theft, car jacking, drug tampering, Antarctica melting, election stealing, bacteria devours flesh, killer bees, antibiotics immunizing, road rage, runaway 707s, anorexia nervosa, e coli in the meat supply, economic meltdown and generational depression. Did any previous generation have this much on its plate? And look at their faces, they're just ... children. 

How will they find peace? And will it ever be OK to think about something but the babies we brought into the world, to share God's grace in this beautiful blue world, and the destiny God has prepared for us?

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}