“Senseless?” No.
And forget about “closure,” too.

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
September 12, 2001 3:30 p.m.

'm an agnostic when it comes to discussions of paranormal phenomena, so I don't necessarily ascribe such an explanation to why I awakened at just before six yesterday morning, Pacific time. I'm more accustomed to going to bed than to rising at that hour, but something I cannot explain jolted me from my dreams and told me to turn on the news. The picture was of the World Trade Center's north tower, billowing smoke, and belching flames into the Manhattan morning. I hadn't yet learned what had caused the fire, or even gained my senses, when an airliner streaked into the picture and exploded against the burning building's companion structure. It's a little late in the season to bring out a movie like this, I thought, for I suspected I was watching a trailer for some late-summer action flick. But the special effects, it seemed, were indeed convincing. Of course I soon learned that it was no movie, and that the airliner I had seen crashing into the south tower had been preceded minutes earlier by one that crashed into the north. How can this possibly be? I wondered.

But I shouldn't have wondered. The word "senseless" will no doubt be tossed about like so much confetti in the reporting that will follow. It's one of those words that has worked its way into the vocabulary of such events, like "closure." I've learned much about people in my twenty-some years as a cop, but these three may be the most important:

Nothing is ever "senseless."

There is no such thing as "closure."

Evil must be opposed.

Evil does indeed walk the world, my friends, and that's all one need know to make sense out of what will so often be described as senseless. But evil, in its everyday habits, casts only faint ripples on the placid pond of American life, ripples that are often barely noticed, if at all. A city's concern for a murder often extends no farther than the crime-scene tape. But today, seemingly, the whole country is a crime scene, and when the final toll is known there will be few homes in America left untouched by this most despicable, most evil of crimes.

As I write this the fate of scores of New York firefighters and police officers remains unknown. They simply did their duty, running headlong into hell on earth even as all other sane people were running the other way. While absorbing the barrage of those horrific images yesterday and last night, I tried to recall the many times I have been called upon to knock on some door and deliver the news that a husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, would not be coming home, that they had been killed in a robbery or a drive-by or any of the other mundane criminal acts which scarcely ripple the pond, and to which most of us in the larger cities have become so inured. In the coming days thousands of people will be opening their doors to such a visit, but until then they will sit and wait and offer themselves perfectly logical explanations as to why their loved one has not called or been heard from. And then the knock will come, and before the visitor speaks a word they will know the truth. For them there will never, ever be closure.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)