To My Baby Girl, After the Terror

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted September 13, 2001.

I was not where I needed to be last night. Not physically, and not emotionally. My daughter is ten weeks old. And last night, and tonight as well, only her mother will be able to hold her, and kiss her goodnight, and hug her, and wipe up her spit.

I am somewhere else.

Tonight I will call home, and speak to my wife, who gave birth to that precious baby girl amidst such hope and pain. And in the background, I will hear that baby's cry: as if she knows something is terribly wrong. Because babies can feel things that the rest of us have learned to repress.

And yet when I finally call I find her laughing, consumed with a desire to do nothing more than reach out, reach out, reach out, and bat at the soft hanging stars and moons that hang from her mobile.

I sigh a deep sigh of relief. The air escaping my lungs, and signifying recognition that 10-week-old babies do not, in fact, understand mass death. They have only begun, indeed, to understand their own life.

It is their parents, it is we, who must impose upon their innocent, naïve, and far preferable world, with the truth that one day mommy or daddy may leave for work and not come back.

It is the parents; it is we, who must impose upon their world, altering forever their smiling, drooling faces that you can only see through the bitter tears of your own disillusionment.

You cannot protect them. Cannot keep them young forever. Oh what I would give to be so young and naïve, as to require my mommy or daddy to wipe my nose and speak to me about anything but mass death.

It is their parents; it is we, who have to tell them of their nation's talk of massive retaliation, and hunting down those responsible for mass death. And inflicting upon them some more mass death, to convince still others -- once and for all -- that mass death really doesn't pay. And that our collective national dick is bigger than theirs.

And while I never expected to speak to you of such things at such a tender age, you might as well know that it is always and forever about the length and circumference of one's national phallus.

Size, it seems, does matter, whether for missiles, or tall buildings, or the airplanes that bring them down. Their shapes (and make a note of it now for future reference), are no coincidence.

So if Osama Bin Laden is the man of the hour, then Al Haig and Hank Kissinger and their students -- who, as it turns out know a little somethin' 'bout mass death -- are apt to make sure he knows how killing is really done. Because they are hung like horses.

Killers have tutors, see, and the classes are full. How many people can they kill? Can we kill? (Kill, Kill). "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." That's what the bumper sticker prophets say. But God has better things to do, I figure, than to sort through the tangled mess that is both the New York financial district and also the human condition at this late date.

I have been in those buildings, have you? I have dropped my quarter in the silver, shiny viewfinders that you could look through, and get a close up view of Greenwich Village, or the Empire State Building, or the Hudson River, or Fort Lee, New Jersey. If for some strange and largely inexplicable reason you felt the need to see Fort Lee, with the assistance of a 1000x magnification lens.

I have dropped my quarters in slots my daughter will never see, in buildings she will never enter, on observation decks that do not exist any longer, except in my mind. And I have listened as the timer counted down the time left before the viewfinder would fade to black.

And I can imagine looking thru the viewfinder, and wondering why that plane looks so damned close.

I can imagine looking uptown as the plane came closer, and closer, and seeing Harlem, and thinking, damn: I shoulda gone to Sylvia's Soul Food. 'Cause Harlem, far from being the bad part of town, was one of the safest places in New York yesterday. Even terrorists know which victims count the most in America.

America, if you want safety, you'd best get your ass to the 'hood. Get your boogie shoes to 123rd street. Move immediately into the Robert Taylor Homes, or Cabrini Green, or the lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. Do not pass go, let alone Wall Street. For there you are like sitting ducks.

And now what baby girl? Will we shed the blood of innocent babies so much like you, to demonstrate to the world how precious your life is? You had best hope not baby girl. Because if so you will never be safe. Not now, and not when you are old enough to understand, and fear, and tremble, like I am right now.

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