Ellen Goodman writes in today's paper, "We call ourselves lucky now if there is one degree of separation between us and the neighbor hijacked on American Airlines Flight 11." We are all touched. Our children are touched. And our daily lives will be touched by disruption of services – from deliveries not being made, family members stranded in cities across the country, food not coming in...more traffic accidents because there are more trucks on the roads trying to make deliveries, more people angry because there papers aren't getting filed, and so on.

The reverberations have only begun. It is how we conduct ourselves in the coming weeks and months that will show us who we really are. Most people are good in crisis (just look at how good we are when our children have a medical crisis) but it's the Sunday afternoons, when we are home, that the toll-taker comes for his fee.

When I talked to my 4- and 7-year-old sons about what happened (they both heard about it in school), their first reaction was to get their water guns and blast the bad guys. But retaliation is not the answer. It only creates more killing. So my four-year old suggested we give the bad guys a huge bowl of candy and soda and nothing else so they would get sick from eating too many sweets. My seven-year old suggested we hang him off a bridge where he could only have salt water. They knew how to make someone suffer.

Perhaps my greatest sorrow around this tragedy, besides the aching gap from losing so many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, is that so many of us, my own children included, want to hurt those that have hurt them. That is their first reaction; to push back, to harm in rage. At my son's elementary school yesterday, a group of first-grade girls came to me at lunch recess for help. The boys were calling them names, pushing them and not letting them play on the jungle gym. It was not all the boys fault; the girls, of course, only wanted to play where the boys didn't want them to. We talked about no touching, no name-calling, – stuff they had all heard before. And most likely, they will do this again today. They are not acting out in response to the disaster. This is normal behavior on middle-class playgrounds around the country.

And it is the same destructive stance taken by so many Americans – creating separation between the good guys and the bad guys, name-calling, physical intimidation. It begins here and grows up to be like our president, aching to shoot somebody. He can not conceive of any other way. But perhaps my kids still can so I head out to the playground again and again, dealing with the conflicts among the big kids and the little kids who wish they were big, dealing with the fights between the boys team and the girls team, stopping the bullies, helping the shy and intimidated kids find their voices. I can give blood to help the victims back east and I can give the kids on the playground a different way to be powerful. I can live with terror and not let it intimidate me.

I feel like the boy who tried to rescue the hundreds of stranded starfish on the beach. An old man told him it wouldn't make any difference, there were just too many. But the boy said as he tossed one back to sea, "It makes a difference to this one."

Let peace begin with me.

Copyright © 2001 Anna Stewart. All rights reserved worldwide.