文章基本信息

标题：There's much work to do
作者：Semion, Kay
期刊名称：The Masthead
印刷版ISSN：0832-512X
出版年度：2001
卷号：Winter 2001
出版社：North Island Publishing

There's much work to do

Semion, Kay

EDITOR'SNOTE

Sept. 11. As NCEW's board and committee heads gathered around 9 a.m. in Pittsburghs Marriott Hotel to finalize the conference, our nation's security blanket was being pulled out from under us. As early arrivers stirred coffee, the north tower of the World Trade Center was struck. Just as folks took their seats around the table, the south tower was struck. Then a section of the Pentagon. Then a hijacked plane went down, 60 miles from where we sat.

Sept. 11. Nine/Eleven as Clarence Page labels it in his column written exclusively for The Masthead. Page was the slated Saturday night dinner speaker at the conference. He hadn't planned to talk about terrorism. The issue wasn't even on the agenda.

Nor was this issue of The Masthead to have addressed terrorism.

But things are different now.

Even after the strikes on that surreal day, the board convened and sought normalcy, planning for the conference as if - perhaps please if - the terrorquakes hadn't shaken the whole country.

In truth, all of us knew in our hearts that 'A Nation at Work," the Pittsburgh gathering with its content-rich program, would never take place. Every now and then, someone would say that thought aloud and others would say that, yes, the odds were low.

And then we'd go forward with the board meeting, one foot in front of the other, with a muted CNN in the background.

Sept. 11. Nine/Eleven.

"Are we at war?" asked board member Barbara Drake in a column she wrote from Pittsburgh. "If so, then whom are we fighting, and where, and when? Is this the end or the beginning?"

Across the country, editorialists were searching for not only the answer to those questions, but also the meaning.

"Cheshire-Puss," says Alice to the grinning cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "Would you please tell me which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," says the cat.

Of course. There are freedoms to guard, storms of hatred to quell, injustices to address, truths to seek, wounds to bandage, friends to befriend. There is much work to do.

Sept. 11 was the beginning. In this issue, we look at what we wrote, what we did, what we thought.

-Kay Sermon