The Four Hundred

I couldn't work. I stared vacantly at the same words, clustered like alien symbols devoid of meaning. An hour passed. I went downstairs, ate an orange, came back to my computer. I looked at the same sentence. It hadn't changed. I looked at it some more. Did some pushups. Told myself to refocus. I wrote another sentence, stared out the window, changed a word here and there, played a game of Free Cell. My concentration was another casualty of unfolding events.

All over the nation, managers have reported that employees were distracted and productivity was suffering. Workers, they said, lingered a little longer in the break room, chatting over morning coffee. They gathered around radios, visited Internet news sites. Work began tentatively. Concentration waned, low-level anxiety had infected the workplace like a lingering flu. Powerful emotions intruded on the work day: anger, pride, sorrow, concern. Attention shifted to waiting tasks, then shifted again. Our collective consciousness was straying to catch the latest glimpse of the ultimate reality show: war.

I tried to work. Usually, I prefer working in silence. But for the past month, news radio has been playing in the background. I wanted to witness history unfolding, but I had a dilemma: If the radio played too loud, I couldn't concentrate. If it played too soft, I strained to hear it and lost concentration.

Reporters talked to me. They were, I was told, embedded, which surely must mean valiant. Not long ago they sounded fresh and eager. But their voices changed after experiencing combat; they soon sounded tired and much older. They told me unsettling things. Sixty-two civilians died in a market. Another helicopter has crashed. Reporters have been killed in Baghdad. People are cheering; people are looting. And before I could digest my daily ration of war news, experts, generals, and analysts told me what it meant. Except that no one could know with any surety what it meant, and probably will not know for decades.

I wanted to write about productivity. It seemed important just a few yesterdays ago, but now so many things have lost their urgency. Mowing the lawn no longer seems important when the house is on fire. Still, I ached to be productive and I knew that productivity is a reflection of my ability to pay attention, and at that I was failing.

But at least I was not alone. During the last month, the workplace had become part newsroom and part forum for deeply held beliefs. People anxiously shared the latest updates from Basrah, Nasiriyah, Karbala, and Kirkuk, places so far away they didn't even exist for most of us a few weeks ago. Employees exchanged e-mails and engaged in debate. Convictions were strong and sought expression. Cubicle partitions, like small Berlin walls, reflected national divisions. Some were adorned with peace signs, others with flags. Both were honorably intended, yet--like other walls of our own making--both kept righteousness in and new thoughts out. Across the nation, two divergent expressions of patriotism were coexisting in uneasy proximity. In automobile factories and law firms, in distribution centers and software development companies, the most extraordinary of our freedoms was being exercised: the freedom to disagree.

Each person found ways of dealing with the inner shards of his discomfort. Some employees reported feeling overwhelmed and did their best to escape the ubiquitous news coverage. Others sought involvement. A CEO of a San Francisco-based company missed work because he had been arrested at a peace rally. Still others displayed photos of friends and loved ones who, with immense heart and unwavering commitment to country, stood ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.

A woman in Portland did not come to work because her son, a reservist, had been called up. A bakery in Texas closed because the owner's son had been reported missing in combat. In Boise, Idaho, the sins of the fathers visited two young men who were sent home after exchanging heated accusations. It seems that the father of one had served in Vietnam, and the father of the other had refused to serve. Some people left work early to avoid nightly demonstrations clogging the streets; others left early to join them. Psychologists who specialize in workplace trauma counseled managers to be patient.

Meanwhile, economists voiced concern because these new distractions coincided with a more predictable blow to national productivity known--not without grave irony--as March Madness. The annual NCAA basketball playoffs are estimated to cost businesses $1.4 billion as people miss work to follow their favorite team and spend work time discussing games and the outcome of betting pools. This year, there were even office pools predicting when Saddam would fall. With equal gravity, money was changing hands on the outcome of bombs and basketballs dropping through the night sky.

In bars and health clubs, March Madness and Desert Madness played side by side, one event elevated to the stature of national entertainment, the other reduced to it. Domestic television coverage was surreal, sanitized with animation. Digital helicopters attacked digital convoys; digital planes dropped digital bombs that exploded silently on digital landscapes. On television, liberation looked possible and painless.

At a graphic design firm in New York, employees gathered in front of an Arab Internet news site. It showed that in other parts of the world the coverage was less entertaining. A child with her intestines hanging out was brought shrieking into a hospital that is medieval by our standards. Star Wars-era weapons still produce Gettysburg-era wounds. After viewing the footage, two women leave work and go home to be with their children.

Like a train wreck, war has proven to be as engrossing as it is repulsive. Managers, already struggling with workers who have been shell-shocked by the collateral damage of an imploding economy, had to compete for their employees' attention with analysts and generals, and a deluge of both heroic and nightmarish images. It was a month of diminished focus and expanded hope, or was it expanded focus and diminished hope? It will be hard to tell for a while.

Me, I don't know what's worse; seeing too much or seeing too little. I listened, I looked. So many voices vied for my attention, and every one held a small piece of the truth. The experts and the generals now tell me we've won. I look at the children, and I wonder. In spite of my lack of productivity, I have learned some important things these past few weeks. I have learned that jingoism and cynicism have something in common: Both prevent us from seeing what's really there. And, if killing alone could solve the world's problems, surely they would already be solved.

I gave up trying to work and turned up the radio. A reporter said that the situation in Iraq is unsettled.