Columnist Jon Ralston: Feeling of nothingness overwhelmed by emotion

Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001 | 7:50 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the public affairs program "Face to Face" on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the Ralston Report. His column for the Sun appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at ralston@vegas.com

IT WASN'T UNTIL late in the week that I finally felt it -- the sadness, the revulsion, the queasiness.

The World Trade Center fireballs, the gash in the Pentagon didn't engage those emotions. They were too unreal, too remote. And for most of the week, I wondered why I hadn't felt more. I felt guilty, almost hollow that I hadn't broken down as so many had.

Maybe it was the time spent in quotidian tasks -- picking up my daughter from school, buying milk, giving a long-planned speech. Or the numbing journalistic duties -- interviews of observers, tracking the congressional delegation, groping for new angles. But in the blizzard of activity, I did not feel mournfulness or melancholy descend on me.

Then, on Thursday, I saw the victims' names scroll down the TV screen, the way baseball or football scores usually do. I grabbed the remote and quickly switched the channel -- I was terrified I might see someone I knew. I felt sick to my stomach.

But the next day is when the veneer of equanimity that had contained any emotions melted away. I saw a pregnant woman from New Jersey on "The Today Show" and heard the voice mail from her husband on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center only minutes after the first plane smashed into the once-sparkling edifice. His plaintive, desperate expressions of love, probably moments before his death, were excruciating, the look on the woman's face devastating.

Everyone will have a story like that to tell after last week -- a story about when this metamorphosed from being like the Nakotomi Tower in "Die Hard" to reality, when it morphed from some Tom Clancy fiction to fact.

People operate on automatic pilot when tragedies happen. But everyone is wired differently and when that switch is flipped, it's clear some have better programming than others.

I have family in New York (they are fine) like many others, including Mayor Oscar Goodman. But I, and this surely is true to some extent of Goodman, the immersion in work, the imperative of public duty was instinctual.

At some point, though, for everyone, the adrenaline stops coursing and gives way. For me, that point came Friday when I saw that New Jersey woman, remarkably strong in the face of the unfathomable, submitting to an interview from Matt Lauer.

And then a swirl of emotions and thoughts take over, some of them contradictory.

I remember my father's childhood admonition about organized religion being the single greatest cause of carnage in human history. I try to imagine the imbued hatred that drove the terrorists to their insane acts just as I feel my own anger well up upon reading the despicable intolerance of Jerry Falwell as he blames gays and abortionists and liberals. And then I interview two religious men -- Rabbi Sanford Akselrad and Mujahid Ramadan -- two gentle men of peace who reached out to each other and have helped organize an "Interfaith Service of Peace" today at 3 p.m. at the Clark County Government Center. They talk of people seeking solace in religion and coming together -- cliches perhaps, but never have they been more apt.

I am amazed -- and hope I continue to be -- by the performance of so many politicians, including our own congressional delegation, which generally has not lowered itself to the hysterical rhetoric of some of their colleagues. I am especially impressed with Sen. John Ensign, whose incessant talk of prayer and membership in Promise Keepers has caused some to label him a zealot but who was one of the first to warn against intolerance in the wake of the terrorism. "If we start fighting neighbor against neighbor, then the terrorists have won," Ensign warned.

I actually wonder about all the people I know in the political arena -- elected officials, staffers, friends, acquaintances -- and the antagonism they endure, often from the same kind of blind fury that invested those terrorists. I wonder when one of the gadflies we don't take seriously, as he or she inveighs against a politician or a government or invokes some conspiracy theory at a public meeting or through cyberspace, will lose control and resort to violence. Irrationality is irrationality is irrationality.

I muse about the death penalty, which I oppose and yet I wonder how can I after this; I consider my general lack of patriotism, deadened perhaps by cynicism, and wonder how can that be after this; and I think about my disdain for the ignorance of most people and then marvel at the heroism of ordinary folks and wonder how I can be so arrogant after this.

There is a tendency in my business to become inured and I felt that inclination this past week as I watched some journlaists and politicians try to fill time and often resort to maudlin observations, insipid prattle and forced solemnity. But as I saw those names on the screen -- like a crawl of the dead -- and I saw the ineffable hurt in that pregnant woman's eyes -- a snapshot of a nation's anguish -- I knew that no words would ever suffice, no description would ever measure up.

And I knew it would be difficult to ever again experience the feeling of feeling nothing.