Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [1]
We sat on folding chairs with other tourists for several hours. No one talked—we just watched and cried. At first I was in shock, then slowly I began to piece together the personal implications. I worked with three publishing companies in New York and I worried if my friends were safe. My daughter was scheduled to fly to D.C. from Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday morning. Where was she? The Canadian/United States border and the airports were closed. How would we get home? Yet never had my own little life looked so petty. There were bigger issues: How many people were dead? What did this mean for America? What would happen to my refugee friends? Was the world as we knew it gone?
Later we walked outside into the crisp September afternoon. The world had changed and the world was the same, the same golden aspen and purple grasses, the same ripe rose hips and rushing water over smooth gray stones. We were safe in a beautiful place, but we weren't thinking and feeling what we had planned to be thinking and feeling.
As I looked through our binoculars for grizzlies and mountain sheep, I was thinking is my editor dead? Are people trapped under the rubble right now, scared and in pain? I imagined how frightened the passengers on the hijacked jets must have been, and I kept hearing imaginary airplanes. Watching the river, my husband said sadly, "No matter how crazy we humans act, the water keeps on flowing."
The beautiful time and place seemed to deliberately induce irony and contrast. The silver glaciers, emerald forests, and turquoise lakes humbled us. I kept thinking about all this sacred beauty in our sad, deformed world.
On 9/11, the book I had just finished seemed meaningless.The Middle of Everywhere felt like it had been written in and for a world that no longer existed. But later that afternoon, as I tried to read the books I'd brought with me—one on the Sand Hills of Nebraska and another on the life of Ben Franklin—I realized they were irrelevant, too. On September 11 everything—Shakespeare, Broadway, flower gardens, Bob Dylan—was irrelevant. Only Jihad and death seemed to matter.
Fortunately time didn't stop on September 11. As weeks passed we all began to put our terrible tragedy into perspective. My book began to seem applicable to the new world, maybe even more so than before. Refugees were still here, and they were even more beleaguered. A Kurdish family called to say, "We are confused and frightened and cannot eat. We have been harassed at work for being Muslim." Mohamed told me, "Bintu and I fear we have brought the war from Sierra Leone to America. We thought America was safe. Now we don't know where to run."
One of our greatest needs as a nation is to understand how other people see us, and this book is filled with stories about how people from different countries and religious traditions view Americans. In the aftermath of the disaster we all have images of Arab terrorists in our heads. In spite of our values and best intentions, we all are occasionally guilty of racial profiling. This book gives readers other images and replaces fearful stereotypes with stories of real and interesting people. I truly hope it will be an antidote to hatred and fear.
I have been struck by the kindness of many Americans toward our Muslim neighbors. One of my friends, a psychologist, lost his brother who worked at the World Trade Center. As he flew back to New York to pack up his brother's apartment, he made arrangements to start a Muslim-support group for local people. At Lincoln High students asked their teachers how they could organize to help Muslim kids. Twenty members of our South Street Temple volunteered to help refugees who were frightened by the recent events. Our politicians, our newspapers, and our churches have worked non-stop to make sure no hate crimes were committed in our town.
All over our country people have an impulse to help, to make our country safer and stronger. One of the best ways to help is to befriend newcomers. As we welcome