I have no clear idea what shape the world will be in by the time you open this magazine. The cold-blooded terrorist attacks left all of us here at Utne Reader staring into the future with a numbing mixture of grief and anger and fear.

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As a nation we have faced many steep challenges, but we’ve been mercifully free of worry about the world’s woes crossing our borders to claim innocent lives. The horror of war, for Americans not in uniform, has always been an abstract concept. I think this safe distance from the front lines has shaped our sometimes oversimplified view of international events and the aggressive course of U.S. foreign policy. But now, even as the American public backs extensive military action, we are no longer shielded from the full realization of what war means for men, women, and children.

Everywhere you looked were pictures of missing people, thousands and thousands of them, placed by desperate friends and relatives, in hopes that a miracle might occur. . . . These sheets of paper are abso-lutely heartbreaking. The pictures of the missing show people of every nationality and race, every age and religion, describing their physical characteristics and identifying features and telling when they were last heard from. . . . The pictures show them hugging their wife or husband, holding their child or a pet, embracing friends in a bar. They are so young. So vibrant. So innocent.

This is not an account from Berlin 1945 or Beirut 1982 or Sarajevo 1994. This is an e-mail from my friend Ron Williams, describing scenes outside his front door in New York City. Even now, many days after the attack, it chokes me up to read it. So does another passage from the letter in which Ron (co-founder of Detroit’s Metro Times alternative weekly) describes the spontaneous crowd that gathered along Manhattan’s West Side highway waving flags and homemade banners to cheer firefighters, police, and other rescue workers heading home after 18- and 24-hour shifts searching for wounded in the rubble of the World Trade Center.