Vulnerablity in the Town, Country, and World

          The tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attack marked a type of vulnerability that America hadn't faced and likely will never face again. Both of the essays highlight vulnerabilities that possess different qualities and how they struck various people throughout the country. The essay by John Updike takes on the task of trying to explain what it was like in New York and not what was on the news. On the other hand, Susan Sontag attempts to explain what is wrong with the public figures and news anchors and how they are (poorly) approaching the events and the healing.

          John Updike highlights the "false intimacy" that surrounded the news coverage of these events. He is one of the millions of New York City residents that was forced to witness the collision and collapse of the World Trade Center. He talked about the notion that television brought about, that it was an unreal event that could be fixed, and essentially was fixed when you turned off the TV. I agree with that idea, and that, myself, being only 16, thankfully haven't lived with or witnessed something as horrific as this crisis. Outside of the premises where a tragic event take place, the idea that time heals all wounds is prevalent. But to this day New York's people look into the iconic skyline and are forced to look into the empty space where two towers disappeared on that afternoon. To the people in the greater New York City area, the nightmare lived on for weeks and continues  to live on. He powerfully mentions the other side of the abstraction of war, as quoted in the essay, "We have only the mundane duties of survivors--to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living." The most powerful element is that risk is the price of the freedom  and that we all live in a country worth fighting for.

          Susan Sontag describes the events as a reality of how the world works and how the United States plays a part in the global world. She also very powerfully, in a very convincing manner, describes the way that public figures are "joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public." She makes a case that the attack was not cowardly, but "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower." The 9/11 attacks are attacks that will forever live in infamy and that the public needs to be asked to bear a burden of reality, and that it is a effective way to heal. She justifies that the way the politics of democracy is run has changed too much and that the event is unworthy of democracy. We can grieve, but we have to be smart and not turn the politics into therapy and do something to keep these event from never happening again. Sontag hints that the ways to change are internal, not forcing change on other countries. The essay states that the saying that, "Our country is strong" is not consoling. While no one doubts that America is strong, that's not all that America can be and has to be to move on and change.

          The 9/11 attacks are surrounded by one word that is common in these two articles that were published by The New Yorker: vulnerability. Both have their beliefs, which everyone can agree with, and all hold what the authors find is the underlying problem about the attacks that rocked America to it's core. The essays have different themes, but all come together to explain and teach people the deeper take on the events that took so many lives and shattered the innocence of so many more people across the country.