My dreams have been disturbed recently. Vivid Thomas Moran landscapes, troubling cross-country drives, the return of dead relatives, bad men and me unable to stop them. I have been so confused about the events of the last fourteen days. No, confused isn’t the right word. Rather, I’d say concerned, saddened, too. I just can’t comprehend the scope of this tragedy.

I am also struggling over the causes and the proper response. I find it unfathomable that anyone could wish thousands of civilians dead. As Lisa says, this is surely the sign of evil as we recognize it in a secular world: to have lost the moral compass that can lead one to devalue human life to nothing. For some time now I have had great unease using absolute terms like evil, but I really believe that these are completely unjustifiable acts. . . .

As if this weren’t bad enough, [the loss of liberties and a fundamental change in our national optimism], most of this has been directed against a particular type of person. Indians, Sikhs, Arabs . . . all are being regarded equally with suspicion. My good friend Mona, an Indian Muslim, has not been singled out, but her sister and brother in Wyoming have been quite badly abused verbally. Hostility abounds everywhere, though. Mona’s mosque [in Seattle] has been repeatedly vandalized. Her aunt’s mosque in Canada was burned to the ground. . . .

The difficulties faced by Mona’s sister and others in Wyoming was the subject of an October 18, 2001, Times article.

A NATION CHALLENGED: THE MUSLIMS; Tough but Hopeful Weeks For the Muslims of Laramie

By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: October 18, 2001

In the first week after the September attacks, when Saha Waheed had become perhaps the most visible Muslim in the cowboy state of Wyoming, she was walking at dusk when two men rushed up behind her and said that anyone who wore a scarf on her head should die, she said.

A few days later, a truck jumped a lane and nearly ran her down in a crosswalk, Ms. Waheed said. And this week, the post office refused to deliver a box of cookies she wanted to mail to a friend. When she was asked for identification, she said, she produced a Wyoming driver’s license, her university ID and two credit cards, but the post office still wouldn’t take the package.

”The weird thing is, I’m about as Wyoming as you can get,” said Ms. Waheed, the only student at the University of Wyoming to wear the traditional head scarf, a hijaab. ”I moved here when I was 1 1/2 years old.”

Another Muslim woman, Barbara Ghaddar, was forced to flee the Laramie Wal-Mart with her two daughters when someone approached them and shrieked, ”Oh, my God — the terrorists are here,” she said. Mrs. Ghaddar is from Iowa, born and reared in the Midwest.

It has been a rough five weeks for the seven Muslim families who live in Laramie, which sits like a mirage on the wind-raked tabletop of the nation’s least-populated state. Some of the families, who stand out because of their skin color or clothes, said they were afraid to go outside for days on end. . . .