ERICA GLOGER (Cardozo 3L student)
SEPTEMBER 11, AGAIN.

On September 11, my life changed drastically and irrevocably. I have a Polaroid picture of myself, three days later, holding my new baby sister; she, gripping my finger like a life force. On that day I was reminded (yet again) that I was not the center of the universe -- even mine-- and my mother was not only a provider, but also a separate entity and a producer -- a force to be reckoned with. My sister had been made in a frenzy of love, anticipation, emotion and planning of which I did not, could not understand then. Yet I knew even then that my mother had joined the ranks of mothers with babes; with baggage. And the ramifications were permanent.

From 20 years later, I hold a picture in my mind of myself, only three days after the Event, at the local watering hole across the street from my cramped New York city stuio apartment, clutching my glass of beer like a life force with the knowledge that my mother -- my country, had joined the ranks of vulnerable and enemy nations. Something had happened to my nation in a whirl of force and violence and misguided love of a vengeful G-d that begged my understanding. But I could not then understand the ripple effect of the terror, not quite. Instead like 20 years before, I was supposed to be proud of her. My mother, country. My home.

While the violence of September 11, 2001 did not touch my body nor came as a death sentence to me, it was, in a sense, as a friend alluded to shortly after the Event, a rape -- and we, collectively, were its victims. What once was the mental and media image of buildings in flames and crumbling began to recur in my mind as a violent penetration of the solid body of our nation. Sullen fear and insecurity the language we spoke, for it was terror at its most complicated and heinous incarnation that we faced squarely in the eye. Me, from a physically safe distance on 5th and 12th, under the Yeshiva University awning which we all imagined could be the next target. I guess fear has a way of multiplying under such pressures.

So what is pride when inextricably linked with overreaching vulnerability? And how could I/we/they not have seen the calamity waiting to happen? And to prevent it because we lived in an advanced age of super nuclear intelligence, worldwide Internet tracking systems and DNA; or to instinctively have seen it coming in spite of our progress -- or possibly, because of it. And in the months that followed: of detentions without cause, of attacks against Arab-Americans, of rising Anti-Semitism, of unrestrained oil consumption and unapologetic reaction to collateral damage in Afghanistan, I wondered for what was I supposed to be proud? Were we the victims or the aggressor, or both?

Both, of course. And yet while a struggle to enact this as my living philosophy, it is my feminist sensibility that says that one should not blame the victim: no matter what she was wearing nor if it was she who may have tempted his libido. One cannot blame Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in the Fall of 95, for being Jewish or a peace advocate. Nor should one blame Matthew Sheppard, who was brutally beaten and left to die one Fall day in 1998, just three years later, for being gay or a human rights advocate. I call this, too, terror.

Terror because years later, I still hold inside the heart-wrenching terror that those calculated murders instilled in me as a young, gay, Jewish woman. And now this Fall; with these memories and that of 9/11/01, I have occasion to mourn the innocence I, myself, lost with each loss. Yet it was just last Fall that America came to know more terror; that Terror hit Home for more of us as Americans. And more Americans learned what it was to live as vulnerable yet proud beings in this world. And as the ripple effects are still being felt; the fear has surely magnified. And perhaps, the ramificatons will be permanent.