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Monday, August 02, 2004
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SAME AS EVER
UD has boasted about teaching at an enviable place: a rich private university in one of the world’s great cities. She goes to lunch at bistros next door to the State Department. She’s done some consulting editorial work for the World Bank, which sits a block and a half from her office. Most of the significant sites of Washington are a pleasant stroll away from her desk. All of that is a good deal less enviable today than it was yesterday. Today a code orange threat level was issued for the World Bank/IMF buildings. Terrorists seem to be preparing truck bombs. So for the moment the glamour of UD’s location is more about high-profile vulnerability than about halls-of-power excitement. But, well, the business of vulnerability…. Washington, DC has for a number of years been a high-profile target, and everyone here knows it. A colleague of UD’s knew early about the Pentagon attack, because she saw the building burning from her office window. After UD got back from a semester in France, she found it odd that all of the trash bins had been removed from the DC Metro, until she remembered that they’d been taken away as a security precaution. There are cameras everywhere. When UD donates blood at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, her car is stopped by lots of armed men at the entrance and seriously examined, with dogs and electronics. In fact, for UD, the once-simple business of giving blood has become emblematic of our new lives. Admission to the NIH campus, and then to the Clinical Center where the blood labs are, and then the interview with the nurse -- it’s all become a much more elaborate and nervous business. Yet for UD - for most people here - it’s all still background chatter. Undeniably there’s been an atmospheric change, but even after UD understood that the White House (four blocks from her office) had possibly been a September 11 target, and even after she walked past the burn unit housing people who’d been hurt in the Pentagon attack (UD was in the Washington Hospital Center visiting her mother, who’d had surgery), UD remained calm. Denial? Who knows. Having a friend who routinely goes to Kurdistan and Peshawar perhaps helps UD put in perspective the business of vulnerability. In any case, UD will return to her desk at her university in early September, same as ever. Barring a new horror. |