Making connections

Spain, Sept. 11, 2001

I am sitting in a park on the median of El Paseo del Prado, watching traffic go by at upwards of 50 mph sometimes. … Madrid is definitely not a place to jaywalk, that’s for sure. I do enjoy walking around cities, even through I rarely know what I’m looking at. And I enjoy las pequeñas conexiones, the little connections with people like the nice guy at the coffee bar. He looked and talked to me like I was a real person, not just some dumb tourist. Which, of course, I am. (I will go to the Museo del Prado this afternoon. …)

Spain, Sept. 13, 2001

About 1 1/2 hours after my last entry, the world as we know it changed; what remains now is to discover how.

By some strange coincidence, at about 3:30 p.m. Madrid time on Sept. 11, instead of heading right to the Prado after my friend José and I had eaten lunch and he had gone back to work, I decided to turn on the television in his apartment. The news was on, a plane crash in Pennsylvania; they didn’t know if it was related or not. Related to what? And then, the images, the unbelievable images of “las torres gemelas,” the Twin Towers.

I wasn’t sure if this was a movie or what, so I changed channels. And there it was again and again on every station. It seems now that when I saw the towers fall the first time, it must have been as it was actually happening, but I was having a hard time comprehending anything I was seeing, much less hearing.

I called my mom at home in Reno, and as soon as I tried to talk, I burst into tears. And the first thing I think I said was, “What am I going to do?” Even at the time, it sounded selfish. But it came from a place inside of me that was suddenly feeling marooned, alone on the other side of an ocean while my country was undergoing a horrific tragedy, and knowing that in less than a week I was supposed to be flying into JFK. What if there was a war, and I was stuck—or safe—in Europe?

A few seconds later I pulled myself together, and one of the next things I said was, “Well, it was only a matter of time.”

One can’t spend three months surrounded by Europeans without realizing how arrogant and isolated the United States can seem. If nothing else, breaking through that arrogance is a challenge that for many seems worth taking on. Sometimes, the challenge exists on an individual level, confronting a visiting American with critiques of our hypocritical foreign policy. Sometimes it is on a much, much larger scale.

The Spanish and German friends I was spending time with that week were appropriately shocked and sympathetic about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks but not, I think, surprised. Terrorism happens. Just a few weeks later, a car bomb exploded on a street in Madrid that I had walked within blocks of.

A year ago, I remember hoping that if anything worthwhile came out of the Sept. 11 horror, it would be that the United States as a nation would wake up to realize that our actions provoke reactions, and that our country is not an island fortress, nor can it ever be one.

I was hoping that, although we would have to be tough on the surface, behind the scenes foreign policy makers would realize that it was time to stop our march toward isolationism and start learning to understand how the rest of the world thinks and feels. To make not pequeñas—little—but grandes conexiones with our allies and enemies alike, in order to create a world free from suicide attacks and “regime changes” alike.

A year later, I’m still hoping.

RN&R contributor Maija Talso, former executive director of the Theater Coalition, lives and works in Reno.