University Serves as Sanctuary In Middle of Terror, Violence

The Washington Post reported that the explosion left pools of blood and debris around the cafeteria and charred some walls. Wires dangled from spots in the ceiling where tiles and insulation were blown to shreds. Shoes and blood-drenched clothing littered the area.

A year ago, on an otherwise beautiful Tuesday morning, our University awoke to one of the worst days in our nation's history. Immediately after the attacks, campus life took on a strange duality. There seemed to be two worlds: one inside on our television sets, where everything appeared to be falling apart, and another outside on the walkways of Polk and McCorkle places, where almost nothing seemed to have changed at all.

The bombing at Hebrew University violated that sanctuary of learning, destroying its ivory tower in the amount of time it took to detonate an explosive with a cell phone.

Meanwhile, over the past year in Chapel Hill, cell phones have continued going off in class, bars have kept on buzzing with activity, and life has churned on with beautiful regularity.

While a year ago we felt like students at Hebrew University, we'd really never been further from it. In last week's State of the University Address, Chancellor James Moeser best described the attacks' impact on our campus when he said they altered the context of everything around us. Our sanctuary of learning has mercifully remained a sanctuary.

Despite being blessed by our disconnect from last year's horror, it creates a problem.

How can those of us who have no personal ties to the attacks successfully mourn from this peaceful environment those who died?

What can we possibly know of the pain of watching the towers collapse on television while knowing that a loved one was inside? Or of the heroism of the rescue workers who died a year ago? Every time I try to imagine, I fear that I'm drifting into sentimentality, experiencing the catharsis that comes with grief without the pain that should precede it.

Are we just phonies?

For me, the best way we can avoid turning genuine sympathy into self-serving sentimentality is to make our grieving a celebration of our sanctuary here in Chapel Hill.

First, as the travesty at Hebrew University demonstrated, academic institutions aren't always immune to our world's endemic violence.

In the past, Chapel Hill has waded out chest-deep into the troubled waters in which our country has repeatedly found itself. Our University almost ceased to exist during Reconstruction, and its students repeatedly faced military drafts during the century that just ended. We were lucky this time; we barely got our feet wet. Just alone, that deserves celebration.

Second, to truly celebrate this place, we must make use of it. Today's volunteer fair starting at 11 a.m. on Polk Place provides a wonderful opportunity to recommit ourselves to the fervor for public service that overtook our campus a year ago.

As Colombia University writing Professor Mark Slouka pointed out in a recent essay about the aftermath of the attacks, catastrophes like Sept. 11 occur every year, just more subtly.

While about 3,000 Americans died as a result of the attacks, more than 8,000 people die each day from AIDS -- 6,400 of them in sub-Saharan Africa alone. No one will hold a vigil in their honor today, but we can still put our sanctuary to good use serving them and the billions of other humans silently living blighted lives around the world.

A year ago, roughly 3,000 Americans and six UNC alumni lost their lives. Today, let's avoid false sentimentality.

They deserve better.

Jim Doggett can be reached at jdoggett@email.unc.edu.