by Penny Reeder
WASHINGTON, September 12, 2001 — Today I sit with still fingers resting upon the home row of the computer keyboard and long for the wisdom to write something that can help readers make sense of events which are totally unacceptable. A radio plays softly in the background of my consciousness. The news is devastating. Alison Aubrey has just told Neil Conan, who is hosting NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” that she has heard an estimate that as many as 40,000 people may have been killed yesterday by terrorists whose identity is as yet unknown. Conan says, “I have never hoped so much that an NPR reporter is wrong,” and Aubrey, with voice shaking, agrees.
We cannot comprehend such a tragedy. My children ask, “Why did this happen? How could anyone do a thing like this? Will we go to war? Who is our enemy? Who are our friends?”
As I struggle to find answers, for them and for myself, I long to be able to tell them that life will return to the easy way we took our safety and security for granted just the day before yesterday, but I know that I must tell them the truth and that life will, in fact, never be the same for any of us again.
Today there are military officers, wearing camouflage and carrying weapons, stationed, with a humvee, at the corner down our street. Today, the only planes in the skies overhead are fighter planes. Today we think about friends and ACB members who we know live in New York City; we worry about their safety and pray for it. Today we answer e-mail messages from kind friends and supporters in the United States and across the world, thanking them for their sympathy and their concern. Today we resolutely came to work to assure anyone who might doubt it that we will continue being the people and the organization and the nation that we have always been, that, yes, we will continue working to make life better for people who are blind and visually impaired, and traveling the streets of Washington, D.C. because they belong to us.
Today, when Charlie Crawford, Krista Merritt, Melanie Brunson and I were meeting with folks from AFB and NIB to discuss issues on a legislative agenda which seemed this morning to be a relic of another era, our building began to fill with smoke and fumes. Quickly, we and everyone else on staff and in the 11-story building evacuated. We’re all on edge, and our immediate presumption centered on the likelihood of a terrorist attack. Firefighters arrived, along with news crews from local TV stations and photographers from our across-the-street neighbor, “The Washington Post.”
No, it was not another terrorist attack. Just a rather routine occurrence. While testing the building’s heating system, fumes from the boiler, which had not been turned on since April, had escaped into the building’s ventilation system. Eventually, we put our cell phones back into our pockets after reassuring relatives and one another that it was a normal day, a minor happening in the scheme of things. Knots of building tenants who had gathered in nervous groups along the sidewalk across the street from 1155 15th Street gradually dispersed. We crossed back over 15th Street and came back to work, struggling for normalcy and security in the routine of e-mail, legislative strategy sessions, and the casual discourse of people who care about one another.
Yet we, like all of you, are not the same people we were the day before yesterday.
We at “The Braille Forum” extend to all of you who have lost loved ones, and all of us who will never again be the innocent people we were before September 11, 2001, our sadness, and a kind of desolate, shared sympathy for which there seems to be no word in the English language. We are grateful to be members of the ACB family, for we can find among our friends and colleagues, our brothers and sisters, our role models and our mentors the strength and support which nurtures us in moments of sadness and sustains our spirits as we pledge to preserve our way of life. Like all other Americans, we bow our heads in sadness, ask God for help and understanding, and pledge to survive the tragedy of a country at war, lives lost, and innocence and complacency vanished. God bless us all, and God bless America.