Last Friday, my friend Marcela had a gathering to commemorate the Day of the Dead. She had food left over, so on Saturday she and I invited a group of women to come over, sit in a circle, and talk about what we’ve been feeling since September 11. To our surprise, most of the people we called came, even if they had prior plans. For the 13 of us who gathered, it was a huge relief to acknowledge aloud how surreal it is to be going through the normal motions of our lives, as if 9/11 hadn’t really changed anything. As one woman

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said, 'In my heart, I know that the change surrounds us so completely, like water we swim in, that we can’t begin to comprehend it.'

For me, the genesis of the gathering was the fear I felt in the pit of my stomach when I realized that my babies are draft age. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about what is worth fighting for, about what freedom and independence mean to me, about how powerless most of us feel to live our lives and our convictions fully. I know that many of the luxuries I take for granted are predicated on economic injustice and the plundering of non-renewable resources—and the changes I manage to make in my way of life are minuscule and incremental.

If you throw a frog into boiling water, it’ll jump out, I’ve heard, but if you put it in tepid water and heat the water gradually, the frog will boil to death. The analogy is obvious, but none of us seems to know where the fulcrum for change is, so we just lie back, enveloped by that soothing warmth.

Marcela, who is Chilean, reminded me that September 11 was also the date when Chile’s longtime democracy was overthrown by a military coup orchestrated in part by the CIA. The year was 1973. The coup was followed by waves of terror, by curfews, greatly restricted freedom of expression, and the death or disappearance of 3,000 people. According to Marcela, the dictatorship’s grip was cemented by government policy that effectively stupefied the population: an edict forbidding groups from gathering coupled with a steady diet of televised sports and entertainment in lieu of public discourse.