Everyone needs a well of hope. Did you hear that there was a 70-year-old man on a top floor of one of the towers who managed to surf the crumbling building all the way down to the street, surviving with nothing more than two broken legs? We would love to believe what we cannot imagine is true. We keep giving blood, out of faith that the rescue workers will yet find someone whose life it will save. The search dogs digging through the World Trade Center crypt have become so discouraged by their failure, day after day, to find anyone alive that rescue workers have taken to burying themselves under blankets and allowing the dogs to sniff them out and "save" them, while others watch and cheer and pat the dogs on the back.
If only they could do the same for the rest of us. We are all in the Third Tower now, the one built instantly from the rubble of the other two. We have been "awakened to danger," the President said, have heard the planes and seen the flames and are uncertain about what to do next. We're told to go about our business; we want to head for the stairs. When millions of us all imagine in the same week what we would say in our last cell-phone call to our family and friends, something in our lives, and our nation's, has changed forever.
People diagnosed with a serious disease talk about how it rewires them, lifts them to a different place where every day is a gift--and you don't know how many more you'll get. So you are overwhelmed by your children's skin and the taste of the garlic and the way the dirt smells on a rainy day, and you marvel at all the things you stopped noticing a long time ago. That is usually a private journey, shared with closest friends. We are now taking that trip together.
It has become a time of homecoming and housecleaning, of fathers calling their estranged sons and making confessions, trying to put things right; of old friends getting past small grudges that don't matter anymore and probably never did; of couples renewing their vows and deciding it's O.K. to go in late for work. Single twentysomethings in Manhattan whose families live far away have started having sleepovers, like in junior high. Eighty-year-old parents, the generation that thought it had won the Last Battle, call their grown children every night and cry.
And so President Bush faced a transcendent challenge Thursday night, to address a nation in all its grief and anger and confusion over what comes next. It's hard to plan D-day against an enemy with no beaches and no borders, and when wise heads counsel that the most effective counterattack may be the least publicly satisfying kind--the quiet intelligence and financial and psychological warfare that can best "drain the swamp" where the terrorists hide. Would a large-scale attack demonstrate American resolve or play into the hands of those hoping to create a martyr? "Not only do you need the courage of your convictions," Adlai Stevenson once said. "Sometimes you need the courage of your doubts."