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USA: The end of innocence? |
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Tom Carver - BBC Washington correspondent
A steady stream of people passed by shoving money in the plastic cup that represented the till. Some did not wait for their lemonade. Even our local parking warden, a rather fierce black lady, pulled a couple of dollars out of her back pocket. On Capitol Hill waiting to interview a senator, I talk to her assistant. All Sally can think about is her three-year-old daughter who is across the street in her nursery. Neither her world's nor Sally's is statistically any less safe than it was three weeks ago. But whenever a police siren sounds, Sally says she has to restrain the impulse to rush over and whisk her daughter away. "I just feel violated," she says quietly. Victimised America feels like a person who has been mugged in daylight on a safe street. Her mind is clouded by pain. Her world view dramatically foreshortened.
In Europe and the
Middle East people may be able to see why it happened, like we might
understand what drives a homeless man to mug.
But as far as Americans are concerned, they were doing
nothing that justified such an act. They were simply getting on with
their lives when the World Trade towers exploded one still blue morning.
Now there are television programmes and newspaper
articles plaintively entitled "Why do they hate us so much?"
People are not in the mood to go shopping, or go to the
films. It's not that they're glued to the news any more. They just don't
feel like going out.
So much seems inappropriate. They have lost their
appetite. Even for sex. Last week, the word "sex" fell from
number one subject for online searches, which it has held virtually ever
since the internet was invented, to number 17.
A nation depressed
It is staggering to me that one event can depress an
entire nation, especially one this big, but that is what it feels like
living here. I wanted to speak to someone who felt safe.
The eastern seaboard is
so absorbed in its own pain, the rest of the country might as well not
exist.
I rang Wayne and Jean Weischaar. Wayne runs a farm four
miles off the tarmac road in the middle of North Dakota. They are
surrounded for hundreds of miles by swaying sea of prairie grassland.
Surely they would feel safe.
Jean answered the phone. Jean remembers being taught how
to hide under her school desk when she was a kid in case of a nuclear
attack.
In the Vietnam war, she and Wayne were courting and
Wayne was called up for the reserve. "But it was never as bad as
this," she said in her slow Dakotan accent.
Jean was driving to school in Leipzig, a local hamlet,
where she works as a teacher, when she heard the news on the car radio.
She arrived as the children were getting off the school bus. They had
already heard.
A day to remember
She asked her class of 11-year-olds if they wanted to
watch the TV. They all said yes. As she turned it on, she told them,
"This is one day you will remember for the rest of your
lives."
When I asked her why
this felt worse than past crises, she said: "In the past we didn't
get the news like we do now. It's played again and again."
It occurred to me then that the whole of this country
discovered what was happening at the same instant. The senior leaders of
the CIA watched the events unfold at the same moment as the sixth
graders in the remote farm school in Leipzig.
The opinion polls show most people expect another
attack. They stare at strangers in a way they never did before.
Americans can't quite believe they feel this way. I
cannot say whether America will recover its past exuberance and whether
this is no longer the New World with all the connotations of innocence
and optimism that that implies.
But there is no question that America has aged
perceptibly in the last three weeks.
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