By D.A. WILKINSON

By D.A. WILKINSON
VINDICATOR RELIGION EDITOR
COLUMBIANA -- Peace comes naturally in this quiet and pretty city, where people still walk to church.
Yet war and tragedy are not new to some of the residents who gathered to discuss their faith and the ways the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 changed their lives.
They were Pastor David Conrad of Jerusalem Lutheran Church, and five members of his congregation: Dawn Ellis, Jack and Evelyn Perrott, and Bill and Joan Rupert, all of Columbiana.
Conrad: At first, church attendance went up. People have gotten over it, so to speak, as human beings tend to do and attendance is back to normal. For me, there is a deep sadness I can't shake.
Dawn Ellis: To think somebody could take all those lives.
Conrad: We've managed to take lots of other people's lives as Americans, and Christians killed countless Muslims during the Crusades. This whole thing, seeing it on TV, watching the one gentleman free fall, that's in my head forever.
Jack Perrott: I can still see that guy coming down. When you look at the film of ground zero -- I've seen worse than that.
Evelyn Perrott: In the war.
Jack Perrott: [A World War II Navy veteran] I was in Japan, maybe a hundred miles from where the [atomic] bomb hit, and it looked just as bad. I've been in Okinawa, and have seen how that was leveled off, [and] been to Guam and have seen how that was all laid out. It didn't look any worse. I just don't like the idea of it coming this close to us.
Evelyn Perrott: I think we thought that here in the United States, we're safe. We were always going to someone else's land. And it hit home. I think we just got too complacent here.
Bill Rupert: No doubt about that.
Evelyn Perrott: It's scary. I thought I knew people, and now it's like you don't really know. Not that I am scrutinizing everyone.
Conrad: In a city this small you know who is from town. You see people who aren't from town. There are some people in the congregation who are very cautious now, wondering who these people are. People have lost their trust and perhaps their confidence. We've lost our innocence.
Joan Rupert: I feel cautious, but I have a different feeling, maybe because I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, so I'm used to a big city. I've always felt safe in Columbiana but I also felt safe in Pittsburgh. I have several sisters who work downtown [in Pittsburgh] and they say it's quite different.
Sometimes it's hard to believe it happened. Then I'm reminded of the plane that went down in Somerset [County in Pennsylvania]. The beginning [of the attacks] was scary enough, but when you hear Somerset, you think, 'It could have been here.' So every time a plane goes over now, you have a different feeling, like 'I wonder if it's OK?' You question it more.
I don't find myself not trusting. I think sometimes I'm too trusting. I think everyone has some good in them.
Dawn Ellis: What was more eerie for me was when the planes weren't coming over. It wasn't normal.
Conrad: We're on the flight path for Pittsburgh airport, and when the flights started coming over [again], it was very, very unnerving.
Bill Rupert: There were a lot of small planes flying over. I didn't notice them most of the time.
Conrad: I noticed the air reserve from Youngstown practicing low flying.
Dawn Ellis: I felt safer knowing that they were up there.
Conrad: I noticed right after the attacks, everyone was your friend. You go to the gas station, everybody would talk to you, like this immediate bonding with every single solitary person you ran into. That's over.
Dawn Ellis: That's right. On my e-mails, I'd say, 'Stay safe, love you.' Well, I dropped the 'stay safe' and I have to get back into it. We think we're safe again.
Bill Rupert: I'm not too sure about that. We have the [nuclear power] plant down at Shippingport, [Pa.,] and one north of us, about the same distance or maybe a little farther.
Evelyn Perrott: We would be in danger here if we have to move -- which way did they say we would have to go? See, I don't even know -- if Shippingport got hit.
Bill Rupert: I wonder if they have added any security?
Conrad: When I look at television programs that were filmed before, it's like it was an entirely different time in history. People had no idea. When you look at movies made in New York City when the towers were there, it's like, 'Oh my gosh!' It's almost as if instead of counting history in B.C. and A.D., it should be before the attacks and after the attacks. For me, it's that profound of a change. Truly, all of us, deep down inside, we know life can never be the same.
I think about our kids and our grandkids, they're going to grow up in a world -- we've lost our innocence.
Jack Perrott: I'm glad I've got [my life] just about in. (Laughs).
Bill Rupert: Go for it! (Laughs).
Evelyn Perrott: It's our grandchildren and great-grandchildren that are going to be affected by this. We don't have as many years to live here as what we've lived. His [Jack's] brother was out here this summer, and said his wife, Lucille, had said, 'You know, I think we had the best of years in the '50s.'
Conrad: You could run around and not be afraid.
Jack Perrott: We told our youngest daughter, she ought to remember her last birthday for a long time.
Evelyn Perrott: She was 46.
Jack Perrott: On Sept. 11.
Joan Rupert: I still don't think we know what it's like to have a war. The only way I can identify it is every once in a while when I see a picture of New York and those two big towers, and now there's nothing. For many [of the victims' relatives], there was no closure on their deaths, because people can only think they died in the Trade Center. But they don't know, except for those who maybe called a relative, and said, 'I think this is it.'
Evelyn Perrott: I see people cleaning up [at ground zero] and know people are going to get those possessions. I know when my brother was killed in World War II in France, he was buried over there to begin with. Then we brought his body back in 1948. They sent his pictures, his dog tags. We had his things, so we had closure. My dad wanted his body brought back after the war. A man at the funeral parlor here said that was one thing the government did a good job on.
Dawn Ellis: These people have nothing.
Evelyn Perrott: We got back the things that he had with him. The pictures he carried, they cleaned them up. He was shot in the chest. They were damaged [and had] blood on them. I have one.
Dawn Ellis: It's nice to see the flags. I have relatives in England that even have them up. That's something that makes me proud, my old country backed us. Good old England is right there.
Conrad: I have a friend who's a lawyer in Germany, and I called him right after the attacks. He was quite upset. But he was upset also at the way we were acting: How dare anybody touch America. He reminded me, 'You Americans have been pretty arrogant. And now you know -- maybe -- a little bit of what it's like for us in Europe.' He's done internships in Barcelona, and he said terrorism is a fact of life and way of life in Spain. And he reminded me there have been terrorist acts in Germany we haven't even heard about, and so get a grip, and don't be thinking you're so special that this couldn't happen to you. He was quite angry because of the way Americans thought, 'How can this happen?' He was right. We are an arrogant nation. I'm sorry, but we are.
Something that bothers me is that everybody says 'God bless America.' God who? Osama bin Laden says, 'God bless Afghanistan' in so many words. This has come down to a war of gods. The god of America vs. the god of Afghanistan. It's just bizarre.
Joan Rupert: One of the hardest things I had dealing with was so many people blaming it on religion. I had to defend religion. It may be religion but it's one person's way they interpret their religion. It upset me. If I didn't have a belief in God, I don't think I would have come through it like I did. I have a belief that up there, someone is watching us. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just talk about it and work it out and sit down at a table and not have to go to war? It still bothers me.
Dawn Ellis: My relatives in England said now you people -- I'm American now, so I'm a 'you-people' -- know what we've dealt with and what we feel because of Ireland and England. I think we got a lot worse than England ever has.
Conrad: Certainly in World War II ....
Dawn Ellis: Yes, but I mean when I was growing up. You had the killings here and there between the Catholics and Protestants, but we didn't get anything like New York. When I was growing up, it was normal. They're always fighting. They've always been fighting. Look at the bombings in England. It's like we got it all in one.
Evelyn Perrott: I don't think I ever really felt that we were exempt. I think we were lucky.
Joan Rupert: And now we have this constant reminder.
Evelyn Perrott: I remember when the nuclear bomb was developed, a woman who belonged to [this] church and believed, which is true, that God -- this is his earth, this is his world, this is his earth -- and he is in control. This is the way I believe. Man is not, whether he thinks he is. He's not in control of this world. I think that if I didn't feel that, I would be really scared -- if I didn't know that there was someone who was higher up.
Dawn Ellis: Watching over us.
Joan Rupert: If he's in control, what's he trying to show us? If he's in control, why doesn't he stop this? I find myself questioning that.
Evelyn Perrott: We're not puppets. We're free.
Dawn Ellis: That's a hard one.
Evelyn Perrott: He's with us. There are lessons to be learned.
Joan Rupert: In the last few years I've learned especially there is a reason for everything. Sometimes you don't see it now. Three months from now you'll see it. There's a lot of bad that a lot of good comes from. Unfortunately, we have to go through it. But I believe there's a reason for the bad things.
Dawn Ellis: I do, too. People come here and reach out.
Bill Rupert: Maybe we'll get rid of some of these terrorists because of what happened on Sept. 11. Maybe that's the good that's going to come of it.
Dawn Ellis: I feel bad for the parents of the young man [John Walker Lindh] who was [caught] over there.
Conrad: At 20 years old, it's so easy to be influenced, it's so easy for a person to be indoctrinated.
At the late service on Christmas Eve, I had the names of the people who died in [the air crash] Pennsylvania. Everyone who walked in was given a name and age. We stopped three times during the service and remembered these people. And then we went through the church and read the names.
Joan Rupert: Since we lost Bill Jr. [their son who was killed by a drunken driver], life and death has changed for us. I think the more you can accept that death is in life, and the more you can embrace it, the more you can live. 9/11 was such a massive amount of people. That could have been any of us. I'm not ready to go; I want to enjoy what I can now. When I think of that plane that went down in Somerset, those people were heroes, to make that decision to overcome them. They knew, one way or another, they were going to go. To make that decision to save our country, that's what they did. I don't know if I could be that brave.
Conrad: Me, either.
Dawn Ellis: I think we need more security in schools.
Jack Perrott: I used to take my shotgun to school because we'd go hunting after school. No one got shot. If we got in a fight, a lot of time we didn't do that in school. We'd make an appointment to meet somewhere. It's so much different.
Dawn Ellis: There's so much hate now.
Evelyn Perrott: I said this before [Sept. 11]. This nation is in trouble, because we are not trusting in God. Look at the attendance in all the churches. The kids aren't going to come if the parents aren't going to, so who is to blame? The parents.
Conrad: But you can't say [Sept. 11] would not have happened if we had trusted more in God. It was [done by] human beings.
Joan Rupert: If we could just look at any person, black, white, Jewish, Afghanistan, whatever, and look at them the way you look at yourself, [and] how you would like to be respected, what you would like done. And you treat that person that way, that's where we could be at.
Conrad: If anything, [Sept. 11] has made me especially grateful for things I took for granted.
Joan Rupert: I think the more flexible you can be these days, the more open to change, the better you'll be. I find myself reaching out to people more, wanting to help. What made me feel good before doesn't do it.
If I can help someone or make someone smile, I find my myself reaching out. There are so many little things in life to enjoy. Maybe this whole thing with 9/11 has just opened our eyes to how much good there really is out there.