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Things Are Getting Back to Normal — Or Are They?

Three weeks have passed since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks transformed our world. Memorial services have been held, official pronouncements have been made and life has gone on.

Here in Washington, the signs of increased concern about security are everywhere. Concrete barriers are seen around many government buildings, and the streets adjoining the Capitol are closed off with rows of barriers from curb to curb, except for a space in the middle where a security van is parked. The van is moved aside when an official car must go through.

Overhead, no commercial flights have been heard from Reagan National Airport since Sept. 11, but that is due to change later this week. Thanks to the efforts of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta — who also uniquely understands the nation’s economy due to his previous stint as Secretary of Commerce — the economic nightmare that has befallen local businesses dependent on the airport has been deemed more important than the security risks of a runway only minutes from the nation’s key buildings.

There has been no idyllic absence of air traffic noise, however, because the skies have been filled with the unfamiliar sound of military airplanes and helicopters. Whenever they fly by, people stop and stare up into the sky. Children try to identify the planes, and their parents muse about their missions.

Neighborhood children have started to venture outside again, and I can hear their cries from the neighbor’s trampoline or the nearby basketball hoop. I dutifully read the school superintendent’s memo about how to spot signs of anxiety or post-traumatic stress in children, and my boys don’t seem to have enough of the symptoms for me to be worried.

Last week, the Japanese American Citizen’s League and other national Asian Pacific Islander American groups took the courageous step of expressing support for the nation’s Arab American and Muslim communities. Reminding the nation about the wartime Japanese American internment and the damage it caused to individual lives and liberties — they cautioned a new generation to the danger of guilt by stereotype.

Meanwhile, several thousand people marched in D.C. last weekend, saying that the nation’s grief was not a call for war. I noticed Georgetown Law Professor Mari Matsuda and her daughter there, as well as several dozen APIAs — including many students of South Asian ancestry. Some of the South Asian Americans were also protesting the increase of anti-APIA violence that has resulted from misdirected rage against those who look Middle Eastern.

The rise of violence against South Asian Americans and racial profiling directed against people who look Middle Eastern has spurred our community to come together to defend those at risk. For example, the South Asian Journalist’s Association has been compiling and circulating links to articles from American and overseas press outlets that document acts of violence or harassment, and a listserv for Asian Pacific Islander American law professors has been humming with strategies and theories for countering racial profiling.

On Capitol Hill, the balance between security and civil liberties is being debated by legislators struggling with laws that would expand the powers of the FBI and other law enforcement personnel. In a panel at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J., last Tuesday, one foreign affairs specialist suggested that the vertical structures of social, political, and economic control created when the nation-state was the dominant political force, are not adequate to deal with the horizontal social, political, and economic relationships found in the age of the Internet and instantaneous global news coverage. No one country can solve the problems seen on Sept. 11, he said, and no country can stand by itself and hope it can avoid those same problems.

On the economic front, APIA non profits dependent on corporate and foundation support are already bracing for difficult times. One group hoping for a corporate grant heard that the corporation had given a large sum to the New York disaster relief fund and would not make further grants this year. The Washington Post reported last week that one large foundation whose stock portfolio had decreased by 30 percent in the space of a few weeks was postponing plans to open foreign offices and increase community-based programs.

Like other cities and small towns around the country, Washington was coming to grips with a world that was at once different and the same. In one tragic day, the world had become both more dangerous and more interdependent.