A Thousand Shards of Glass

11 September 2001

Bozeman, Montana

11.39 p.m.

. . . today hard terrorism hit soft terrorism and, as is always the case, many innocent people have died. Some reports are now saying that thousands may have been killed but I am sure thousands have been killed.

It has taken the better part of the day for me to bridle my own anger and now I worry that Americans will overreact quickly and carelessly.

What is needed now is calm, intelligence and patience. We should focus on families that have been devastated and care for the wounded and simply attend to the immediate needs of our fellow citizens. I know a response will have to come but it must be a thoughtful and measured response, not one born of nationalistic heat. In the coming days we will have the world supporting us and offering help in ways that just a day before we could not have imagined. It is imperative that we take that goodwill and let the world surround us for a time with care and concern for that, in itself, will be one of the great blows to the terrorists. They will have moved the world closer to us and to each other and we should not squander or take that for granted.

On the other hand, if we do act carelessly we shall proceed down a road that will escalate and we will lose our way in a Muslim world that we do not understand and that lack of understanding will pull us deeper into a Middle Eastern quagmire that will, for many years I suspect, be hard to extricate ourselves from and the cost of it all will be thousands of lives – Americans and others.

We must also be very careful and vigilant about pressures coming from our own shadows that will want to accelerate the call for action. Many corporations will see this as a great opportunity for increased profits from public coffers and they will be pushing the leaders, from behind the scenes, to move forward quickly under the guise of patriotism. Many interests will now converge and I hope that the journalists will stay focused and resist falling into patriotic jingoism themselves.

What we need now is neither bravado nor swagger. We need cool, thoughtful planning and, above all, restraint. Mr. Bush has much on his shoulders. I hope that both he and the rest of us are up to the task but I don’t know. I hope our leaders have read Lawrence.