Joan Liman, who was in the thick of the events on 11 September, shares her thoughts for the future

As you can well imagine, things on this side of the Atlantic have undergone a drastic sea change since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September. I live in a suburb of Manhattan and my husband works in midtown Manhattan, so our world has been directly affected by this tragedy. My nephew's best friend worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the large firm located high up in one of the World Trade Center towers. He is lost and by this time presumed dead. One of my high school classmates was on the downed plane from Newark to San Francisco and some members of our synagogue are either dead, missing, or injured as many of them worked or commuted to the area of the center.

My close friend from medical school works at St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. This was the major triage centre and she witnessed the crumbling of the first tower as she walked to the hospital's emergency department to help out. I also called one of my former students, an Arab American who is now doing his paediatrics residency at a prestigious hospital in New York, to get his view on the events. I was so saddened to hear that because he is dark skinned and has an Arabic name he has been the target of harassment at the very hospital where he worked to treat firemen injured in the attack. His mother is a paediatrician with an office in New Jersey and he is worried because she dresses in traditional Muslim garb and fears that she may be attacked or vilified in the streets.

We all feel connected to the tragedy

I could go on, but after hearing how many people from 80 different countries also worked in the World Trade Center and are now presumably dead, I have come to realise that everyone on the planet has had some feeling of "connectedness" to this terrible tragedy, even if it is only a symbolic one.

I was further connected to it on the Saturday afterwards when a medical school friend and I visited the scene. It was very early in the morning and the streets were rather deserted but the acrid smell of burnt metal and rubber permeated the air as we got closer to the site. We could view it from about six blocks away, and so were unable to get a truly comprehensive look at the damage. We did, however, pass a fire company on Duane and Broadway, which was the second closest one to the scene, and stopped to make our way through the many buckets of flowers that were standing forlornly along the driveway of Ladder Company 1. Peering over the tops, we could read the posters hastily pasted up on the doorposts of the firehouse, offering descriptions and photos of the missing heroes. We chatted with an athletic looking young man who had just returned from working through the night at Ground Zero. He explained that he was a San Diego firefighter and that his entire unit had moved to New York after the disaster. He told us that some of the surviving members of the New York City fire department had been placed under suicide watch, because they were experiencing survivor guilt, having traded their assigned Tuesday shift with someone else, thereby unknowingly sparing themselves the incendiary fate of their fallen comrades.

Could we vaccinate against hate?

I engaged my new friend in a dialogue and speculated if we could "vaccinate against hate" at birth, just as we do against so many childhood diseases, we could inoculate future generations against the fanaticism and brainwashing that has poisoned so many people. To my disappointment, he didn't think so.

As we bid him farewell, and made our return trip on foot back up Broadway I was reminded of an ancient Greek play (Lysistrata by Aristophanes) in which the women of Athens who were fed up with seeing war waged against Sparta decided to issue an ultimatum to their husbands saying that until they (the husbands) refrained from making war, they (the wives) would refrain from making love to them.

Admirable, but I propose another adroit and less divisive manoeuvre. I have tentatively dubbed it "life preservers" to denote that life is a precious gift and must be preserved not persecuted in the name of a higher spirit, such as Allah, Buddha, Jesus Christ, etc. Regardless of your conception of how life on earth began, whether by a "big bang" or via the hand of a deity, the fruits of that labour are so beautiful, awe inspiring, and, in the case of human beings, so intricately crafted (think back to the wonder of dissecting your anatomy cadaver, and marvelling at the ingenuity of the brachial plexus, or the sense of astonishment when you got to see a living, beating heart while holding retractors during your first thoracic surgery case), that our responsibility for having been bequeathed such a precious planet should be to devote all of our efforts to ensuring that it continues to be a legacy "l'dor va d'or" (Hebrew for "from generation to generation.") I think that the time is ripe to start some sort of grass roots effort devoted to ensuring that life on this planet should be carefully and thoughtfully preserved by all those who live on it, regardless of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs. I am not sure how to go about it, but I have been talking to some of my former colleagues and my friends about some ideas that have been brewing in my beleaguered brain ever since I turned on my television that fateful Tuesday. I would be grateful for your suggestions.

It was the misguided ingenuity of human beings who decided that if you cannot get a bomb into a plane, then why not make a plane into a bomb? If the thought and precision and countless hours which went into creating such a deadly paradigm could be harnessed in a constructive way, then I hope that Generation Ground Zero (children born after 11^thSeptember 2001) will never have to witness the unspeakable horror that its ancestors were subjected to on what will undoubtedly go down as one of the blackest days in the dawning of the 21st century. Please help me make "life preservers" work.

Please email your suggestions about an initiative to start life preservers to Joan. There is a monetary incentive involved.