Windows on the World

My young friend Marie was interviewing me last night about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan (her 7th grade history class is doing a unit on decades) and I realized -- though I could clearly picture that on the news -- I actually remember far more details about Kennedy's assassination.

Most specifically, I remember hearing about it in geometry class, and leaving school early, and walking in our front door, which looked like this, and telling my mother about it (she hadn't yet heard the news)... and then, later, the three of us, my father, my mother and I, standing at those windows, looking out with this shared sense of devastation: the world had changed.

And then, of course, just as we were finishing this conversation, the news came on about Osama bin Laden.  Marie seemed relatively untouched about it, but my own daughter texted me immediately, and I realized -- she was Marie's age when 9/11 happened, which was roughly my age when Kennedy was assassinated.

So for my daughter, 9/11 is probably as seminal a moment as the assassination was for me: we both remember -- because she was dressing for school, her first week in a new school (we had just moved to Bainbridge Island),  and she had the radio on, some station run by college students, who basically put their own radio in front of the mike so NPR was broadcasting over their station.  "Mama, something bad is happening," she said, and we stood listening in horror, knowing the world would never be quite the same.

And yet both of us, listening to the news last night, were saddened -- despite the devastation of 9/11-- for Osama and his family: she was sad to hear he might be buried at sea, and expressed a hope he might find what he was looking for in heaven.  Reading her texts, I felt an enormous welling up of love for her: these are such significant events in her life, and I am pleased by her compassionate response -- both to the victims and to Obama's speech.

Somehow, this morning, time is compressed, and I am standing again at the windows of that little house in Cincinnati, staring out at the devastation with my parents, only now it's the World Trade Center, and the rubble we have made in the middle east in our attempts to avenge that act of terrorism.  Like my daughter, I am worried: attacks of reprisal feel inevitable.  Does it matter that some of us are saddened by the killing?  In the end, will our compassion make a difference? 

I don't know.  I can only feel what I feel, and hope...