Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [111]
“Yeah.” I gave a rueful laugh. “Americans, particularly white native-born Americans, have never experienced and probably never understood, that our borders are permeable, that even the United States is only a piece in a larger whole.”
“And now they do,” she said. “They’re the same as us. In a sense, I can feel empathy because you are now equal to us. Americans, like most of the rest of the world, now know in their gut the absolute insecurity of real disaster. You know I love you.”
We sat quiet. As I hung up the phone, I was crying.
Soon friends from Europe began to ring and, as the time zone caught up to her, a friend from Australia. A garbled message from Jorge’s family, clearly trying to put through their first international call. From everyone and everywhere, the message was the same. It was love.
I felt enveloped in a warmth I had done nothing to deserve, brought by the catastrophic deaths of people I never knew.
My overseas friends had always tended to separate me from my nationality when they wished to reinforce our rapport. “You’re not really like an American,” they’d say. Or, “You’re the first American I’ve liked; you’re different.”
“You’re almost like a European.”
“You’re almost like a Brazilian.”
“You’re almost like an Australian.”
Eventually I concluded that I must either be an impressive chameleon, or that their image of an American and my persona—perhaps the first American these people had ever really known—were different. These friends—who almost universally disliked the United States, its foreign polices, its international business practices, its tourists, its governmental attitudes of superiority—felt the need to justify their friendship with me, one of the nationals of this disturbing country. And, the only way they could do that was to separate me, to accept me as the exception.
But the days following the New York attacks were different. We were all equals in a turbulent and dangerous world. A Scottish friend who had recently become a teacher at the London School of Economics called.
“I’ve just come from the student bar,” he said. “Everyone’s crying, hugging. There’s a sense of unity spanning the Atlantic that I never thought possible. I recounted the time the pub blew up from an IRA attack right next to me, a memory I never discuss. A French woman talked about an Algerian bombing in France. A student from Ethiopia talked about the horrors of his wandering from war camp to war camp as a child fighter. And the American students, they were scared, they were crying, but they were hugging, being hugged. And they understood.”
I listened to these calls for a day and a half. The effect was a strange sense of quiet, peace, almost joy. Certainly power. I listened to stories of the courage of individual New Yorkers, and I felt proud of them.
Some years later, while I was preparing to write this book, I reread the notes I made during those days and came across a paragraph on my thoughts of the future. I could hardly have been more wrong:
“These people who attacked New York and Washington, D.C., whoever they are, don’t know the international power they have unleashed. The death, horrific death, of this attack, perhaps it is not in vain. Perhaps from the ashes of this catastrophe will come a new unity, a real and collective unity where the United States can build on this empathy. Attacks like this come out of inequality and oppression. Today I see governments and people standing together. With this compassion, much peace could come.”
Several months later, I was sitting in a café in Little Venice, an area in London of Georgian homes, elm-lined streets, and canals. This café was actually in a boat moored on one of the canals. It had two tables and a warm wood interior, and sold coffee, tea, and sandwiches. The idea, I gathered, was that most people would take their lunches away with them or sit outside in the summer. That day, however, the boat rocked on rain-filled bursts of wind. I was alone with a waitress who said she was from Romania.
I had