Sir, - I flew into Detroit airport on September 5th. Six days later, after the attacks on New York and Washington, I sat glued to my television screen like countless others and watched the coverage as the CNN news captions changed from "America under attack", to "America at war", and finally to "America unites".
But this is not a united country. Today at Ann Arbor, Michigan, groups of students faced each other in the main square, the "diag". American flags and patriotic songs competed for space with peace banners, green arm-bands and peace slogans.
The peace rallies began a few days ago in response to attacks on the Arab-American population in nearby Detroit, which is reputed to have the largest Arab population outside the Middle East.
President Bush talks about war, but he has vocal opponents among Ann Arbor students. And as the emotions of the days after September 11th begin to calm, the picture that emerges is of an America which is unsure of itself, and deeply divided about the response it should make.
I am here to finish some research for my doctoral dissertation (NUI Maynooth) on student movements in the 1960s. The peace rallies of recent days here are not unlike the protests against the Vietnam war over 30 years ago. Indeed, today's protesters include many old-time activists who cut their teeth on Vietnam and Black Power.
The young students are angry and confused, but certain that they do not want any more violence. They are borrowing their rhetoric from the non-violent civil rights movement of the 1960s. Some are starting to talk about a new civil rights movement to protect the rights of all humanity.
They talk about the billions of dollars that the Bush administration is willing to spend on a war effort, while thousands of Detroit schoolchildren have no books and few educational resources. They talk about the military recruitment programs which target poor African American high schools, while white suburban schools are instead visited by academic university recruiters.
The message is clear: they will not support a "racist war" that targets poor and innocent Afghan women and children; they will not support a war in which US casualties will be from the most oppressed sectors of American society.
People here are beginning to talk about the "new Sixties". Some talk with fear, some talk with expectation, and some with defiance. But the certainty is that America is not united. And the implications of that are enormous. - Yours, etc.,
Sinead McEneaney, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.