Will Ulrich: The doubts of a patriot

I'm a New Yorker and -- all things considered -- a patriot. Although I've never been a knee-jerk, John Birch type, I consider myself an American booster.

Sure, I might pass an occasional snide remark about Mickey Mouse or avaricious CEOs, but when you get down to brass tacks, I'm a believer.

I think that Western secular capitalism, to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst system except for all the others. I cheer when the Americans win a medal at the Olympics. I think we usually do the rest of the world a lot of good. I don't think we're too big for our britches.

It's because I know all of this about myself that I was surprised at how I felt last Tuesday. As I sat at work listening to radio reports of a cataclysmic attack on the city I love, as I heard about the collapse of buildings I could see from my neighborhood, as I winced at the thought that someone I loved might have perished, my immediate reaction was not to fight back.

I didn't have instant images of running alongside John Wayne up a hill to slice Osama bin Laden in two. I didn't feel like fighting at all.

Instead, I felt like retreating.

By 1:30 p.m. I was seeing the towers collapse every time I closed my eyes. And every time I saw that horrific sight, I felt the same overwhelming sense of helplessness.

"What the hell can we do to stop this from happening again?" I asked myself.

If we bombed the culprits to smithereens, we'd still be the largest target in the world. Not only that, the kind of monsters who do commit these inhuman acts would still know that something of this magnitude is possible.

As I figured it, so long as we were the most prosperous, most internationally active country in the world, there was really nothing we could do to prevent this madness from happening again.

I sat rubbing my eyes, reeling from my sense of powerlessness when a new question popped in my mind: "What if we just stop what we're doing?"

What if the United States just retreated from the world stage?

What if we just split up into 50 relatively insignificant nation-states? What if we just made our military might disappear? What if we just got our nose out of everyone's business?

It sounded mildly ridiculous, but it just might work. The world would have no reason to think of us as a threat. We wouldn't have to worry about suicidal nutjobs aiming jetliners at our biggest, most symbolic targets.

We wouldn't be a target anymore. We could all just live on hillsides, cultivating our gardens.

As the day wore, I began receiving more and more e-mails, e-mails from friends in Florida, friends in France, even one from a friend in Islamabad, Pakistan.

My friend goes to an international school in Islamabad, and she was obviously shaken to the core. There was fear her school would be bombed. Some of her friends' parents were stuck in Afghanistan.

Her words were touching, but they made me angry.

Screw globalization if this is what it means -- if it means that nightmarish terror can travel across the globe at the speed of a 767, or even at the speed of a message through fiberoptics.

When I finally made it to my common room couch at about 6 p.m., I sat down to watch coverage for the first time. As the images washed over me from all conceivable angles, I kept repeating my bizarre wish to myself, the wish that the world would just become simple.

I wished that life in our country would change so that this could never happen again.

More than a week later -- after days of watching the world react -- I realize that my thoughts of last Tuesday were naive. Most of the globe has countered this atrocity with sorrow and understanding.

We crossed the Rubicon of global superpowerdom more than 50 years ago and there's no going back. American dollars and sense have the ability to lessen human suffering in myriad ways throughout the globe.

But after having these thoughts stew in my mind for a week, I still didn't have a face to go with my resolution. And then, yesterday, I got word that Paul Battaglia, my old editor in high school -- who taught me my first lessons in newspaper journalism -- is one of the missing.

Thinking of Paul's young life cut short by this madness, I realize that acquiescence is no answer at all.

These days, a placid garden on the sight of the Twin Towers would not be nearly as appropriate as a new set of buildings shooting defiantly into the Manhattan sky.

I stand my ground today, but I was ready to retreat last Tuesday.

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