Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Questions to ask
By Steve Sherman
The Daily Iowan (U. Iowa)
04/17/2006

(U-WIRE) IOWA CITY, Iowa — I was talking to a friend on the phone around 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, inviting him to come out. There were people talking in the background on his end. I heard a voice say, "Wait, is that a funnel cloud?" Then my friend: "Steve, I'll call you back." Click.

So I hear a train coming and see funnel clouds, I run to the basement, hear what sounds like bombing, etc.

But there's no use recounting this story in detail, piece by piece, because it's everyone's story. The only oddity about my narrative is that April 13 was my 22nd birthday, and I got the wrath of God as a birthday gift.

This all recalls for me the last tragedy I witnessed: 9/11. Tragedy is often the stuff of instants - sudden explosions, storms - but the memory of the instant morphs into endless actions from the victimized. The offsprings of 9/11 are familiar - blood drives, the instructions to go shopping, Afghanistan, Iraq - but as of my writing, we do not know what will happen following this event: The visible scars, the fates of our "stuff," the new building projects. And within a week, the words "I'm tired of talking about the tornado" will pass through someone's lips, guaranteed.

Crews are working right now, trying to make the town look like the tornado never happened. I saw a new telephone pole being raised less than 16 hours after. By the end of next year, I expect an apartment complex at the former location of Happy Joe's. And on the 900 block of Iowa Avenue, I saw someone's bedroom, the wall and roof missing from the home. I imagined a giant hand would fall from the sky and rearrange the furniture, and swoop up the people like dolls.

And so the issue is: "What now?"

And to answer that question: I'm thinking about it.

And guiding the rebuilding effort should be this central principle - the constant asking of this question: "What does this teach us?"

There is a point to the saying that life is made of "a million little tragedies." When the chance for the awful pokes above the surface, instead of pretending the tragedy is nonexistent, it should prove a formative experience. The lingering memory of the tragic, instead of becoming a festering wound, can be loaded into the magazine of a fortified personhood. There are lessons to learn.

Sure, buildings will be rebuilt, and everyone is offering couches and meals and helping hands. Within a year, or possibly sooner, a visitor unfamiliar to the city will look at this town and never conclude "tornado." But unlike the unknowing visitor, place-memory does exist within the minds of those who bore witness. "That was a pizza place." This conclusion proves superficial, however, because despite possessing the memory of what Iowa City was, the survivors are burdened with the responsibility of organizing their malaise.

This is the symbolic weight of this tragedy attacking a university community, because what education provides is "ammunition for living." So when a tornado strikes, we as a university community can stand up and clearly articulate how this affected us. We can use the critical-thinking skills inherent with a university education to contextualize our suffering. Construction cranes and bricks and mortar and new buildings - these are secondary matters, ensconced in the tiers beneath the fortified mind, which understands tragedy and its million little repercussions. And this mind, and this enhanced self, will stand longer than the most tornado-proof structures.

We can do this right.

[ Back to Student Voices ]