At lunch today I was milling about Café McColl trying to decide what to have for lunch. Normally the place gets mobbed at around 12:30 each day as students rush from classes, which end at 12:20, to the lines that form by the cashiers. But it was well past 1 o’clock and I noticed the relative calm in the cafeteria. There was a lot of people in the cafeteria but most had segregated themselves into different geographical subsets and were busy either enjoying their meals, typing into their laptops, or having animated conversations. The television in the corner was showing the news (it was actually showing The 700 Club) and no one was paying particular attention.
I then tried to imagine what very easily could have been an alternative to what I was witnessing. I imagined the television screen showing breaking news coverage of airplanes having blown up over the Atlantic, reporters interviewing terrorism experts, and discussing the impact of an international full ground stop. The sound I was hearing in the cafeteria was replaced by the stone silence of students standing in front of the television screen, a silence regularly interrupted by the sound of students sobbing at the news of what had just occurred.
Some people look at horrors that occurred and ask “if only we had known.” I look at the tragedies that were avoided and ask “why aren’t we more grateful.”
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