ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608050016
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
Despite being a news hound, when I go on vacation I turn off CNN and detour around news stands - choosing to float for two weeks in a detached and relaxed world without crises or deadlines.
But two events were so horrific this past month that they penetrated even my self-imposed vacation blackout.
I'd only begun to unwind from my inevitable jitters from a trans-Atlantic flight when a TWA jet was blown out of the sky the next day.
As I heard the news, the faces on my own flight flashed through my mind - that diverse cross section of lives brought together by happenstance. It could have been us. Our lives so abruptly canceled.
I thought with anger of those 230 lives left unfinished. Every bump and flutter of my plane had me imagining the worst and mentally listing the things still undone in my life. Each one of them must have had similar hopes, crises, good intentions.
Next came news of the bomb in Atlanta.
What was happening in my own country thousands of miles away?
It seemed impossible to think that the United States could be beset in 10 days by two incidents of such irrational hatred.
I associate such fanaticism - especially if the incidents were domestic terrorism - with more despotic, more oppressive governments. In the United States, we've always prided ourselves on being a government supported by the people, an open government that allows vigorous dissent and tolerates rugged, even bizarre, individualism.
As inexplicable as the actions seem, I sense no widespread internal cancer in our nation - although that's no comfort to families who are forever broken.
Despite my perhaps naive faith in our nation's general sanity, I couldn't help but wonder as I rode trains across Europe last week and saw headlines in Italian or German how other people interpreted this new tragic face for the United States.
As our train glided through the Austrian Alps, a well-read Italian graduate student spoke about America's tradition of guns and violence. Our society's priority seems to be money rather than people, he said, referring to U.S. newspapers and magazines he reads each week on the Internet.
An offhand comment from a young tourist official in Italy, however, was as telling as the student's more thoughtful philosophizing. As I heaved my bags inside her office at the train station, where she had kindly offered to watch over them, she asked without thinking:
"I guess there are no bombs in them?"
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB