LOS ANGELES
The temptation is to believe yourself unique. Your own inconvenience outstrips that of others. Stranded on a west coast business trip in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles last week, I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. And as a handful of us watched and learned more about what had happened on the east coast on Tuesday, we discovered what lies behind the strength of the American experiment in self-governance.

Kate Raffa, a New Yorker in town for a cancelled convention, choked up as she summed up the mood. “I am stuck here and it’s an inconvenience,” she said. “There are a lot of people for whom, if all they had was inconvenience, they would trade everything else.”

Arriving at the hotel Tuesday morning after switching from a hotel closer to the airport, I found that the usually bustling lobby, an international tourism hub that doubles as a downtown lunch spot for people looking for a place to brown-bag, was empty. As I walked from the parking garage to the registration desk, I passed a series of movie publicity posters that share Los Angeles as their theme. The poster for the political thriller “In the Line of Fire” stood out, with a decal proudly stating that the film had used the Bonaventure as a location. The scene in question was an attempted presidential assassination. Irrationally but perhaps understandably, I became uneasy about my choice of locations.

There was foreboding this week in Los Angeles. Three of the four hijacked planes were bound for Los Angeles International Airport. While that fact appeared to have nothing to do with Los Angeles specifically, there was almost a sense of guilt pervading the town. You could hear it on KFWB, a local AM news radio station, and in the voices of the commentators on television.

This week, among the people I spoke to in Los Angeles, there was another sense. It was hard not to find someone personally affected by the terrorist acts in some way. Yet the responses I heard were measured and thoughtful. In a town so intensely focused on presentation and image, where even the bail bondsmen have a keen marketing savvy (billboard downtown: “Bad Boy Bail Bonds: Because your mama wants you home”), even the anger had a quiet deliberation to it, while the compassion for the victims and their families had a sober quality that seemed out of place here in the beating heart of popular culture.

I asked people what they thought individual citizens should learn from the events of the week. The answers were a mixture of wake-up call and reminder of what’s really important in life. “Be more streetwise, and security wise,” said Matt Hourihan, who had moved from New York to Los Angeles for a new job at the end of August. “Every good New Yorker walks down the street and is always aware of what’s around them. I think all Americans need to learn that.”

Meanwhile, Kate Raffa focused on the personal. “I don’t know what people learn from this,” she said. “I do know that, being away from home, it became very, very clear for me that all I wanted to do was touch my little girl. That you can physically reach out to [your family] and comfort them is such a gift anytime, but especially now.”

And what is the role of our government in all this? For most, the lesson to be learned was strategic. Jim Meyers, in Los Angeles for a cancelled convention and waiting to get back to Chicago, said, “The government should take away from this that the days of the Cold War policy of basically taking a passive approach to smaller rogue countries is over.” Matt Hourihan thought the lesson for government was also policy-based. The chief lesson, he said, should be “to focus the money that they are spending on missile defense into fighting guerilla warfare and terrorism.”

I can remember once, shortly after the Persian Gulf War, I was listening to a talk radio station in Los Angeles, where I used to live. I was almost blown out of my seat by the extreme, angry words of one of the callers, who railed at the racial inferiority of Arabs, sprinkling his invective with creative epithets. The host let him go on at length. I lost my stamina before he did, switching stations. The intensity of the tirade had shaken me, and I feared for the state of the world — mostly because the host and nearly every caller were in complete agreement. I saw visions of government internment camps.

Some see that the role of government is to help us to be more than vigilantes. At a time when revenge can be foremost in the minds of citizens, some see a need for moral leadership from elected officials — to remind us of the values we share as humans, to remind us to avoid blanket condemnations and faith-based profiling. Katie Buckland, special assistant for public safety for the Los Angeles city attorney, put it this way: “There is a public role in educating people to the fact that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all loving faiths. These acts would be condemned by any of those faiths.”

Certainly justice will need to be done, and those responsible for the attack on the United States will need to be punished. But we will also need to take care to remember that the perpetrators are responsible for these acts because they are terrorists, not because they believe in the prophet Mohammed. Thankfully, in the midst of anger and the lust for revenge, there are those who seek understanding and balance.