On September 17, The New York Times headlines echo, “Powerful Blast Injures at Least 29 in Manhattan; Second Device Found.” The second device is neutralized four blocks from where the first exploded in Chelsea, but New York is already thrown into panic. News of the bomb in Elizabeth, NJ reaches me through Snapchat on a Penn Station bound train. Thirty minutes ago I had departed a train station half hour from the one aforementioned; in ten minutes I would be at a train station ten minutes from where the Chelsea explosion had taken place. The tri-state area had become a grid of cross-fire in mere moments.

The air in the subway is thicker than usual, if you can believe it. My mother tells me to be aware of my surroundings, my best friend frantically rides home from the city as soon as her classes end. The alarm at Hunter makes my math professor jump in his seat in the middle of an exam. In my head I count the number of police officers I see as they speed along the train lines like the trains themselves. Back in Jersey I listen to the sirens as they draw near, here and then away again in brilliant lights. My co-workers struggle to find the right word for the situation – we settle on tense.

Are things less tense now that we can put a name to the terror or are they perhaps ever more anxious?

Ahmad Khan Rahami faces charges for the bombings in both New York as well as in New Jersey and no sooner has he been arrested then Republican nominee Donald Trump makes a statement: “Those people should be arrested because they are inciting violence, OK. They have websites that tell how to make bombs, how to make all sorts of things that are totally destructive, and you know where they are coming from, and yet we don’t want to touch them because of freedom of speech.”

Who are “they”? Attacks such as these incite fear as a primary reaction, especially since this series of attacks have occurred right after the 15th anniversary of the tragedy that shook the nation on September 11. We worry for our friends, our family, we worry for the people we see ourselves in. We worry for ourselves, before we worry about “them” and Trump feeds on this “us or them” mentality. When we don’t know who “they” are and when our fear is the leading factor in the decisions we make, we tear apart alliances and destroy our chance at unity. Who are “they” and why is it that we feel it is okay to make them our scapegoat without putting faces to vague pronouns?

Why do we not worry for them? Why do we not worry about the people assaulted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, about the children and women who have to endure slurs on the streets? Why do we not worry about those whose religion has been sullied and twisted beyond belief?

What if our safety does not lie in the suggestion of their isolation? What if this isn’t about “political correctness” and “freedom of speech,” but instead about basic human decency?What if this isn’t “us or them”?

New Yorkers are brash, sulky and self-absorbed but in this tense, over-crowded E train, a young man in a head wrap throws his arm around to stop me from falling forward when the train jerks to a stop. His action is reflexive.