Letting in and being with the awfulness of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Tuesday morning, when I came into my cottage from the screened tent that serves as my sleeping womb, there was a somber message on the answering machine from my early-rising friend Barbara: “Things are not healthy in this world you’re waking up to today,” she said. “It’s time to offer really big prayers.” She’d then left word of the passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Towers and Pentagon.
Like all of us, I was stunned, incredulous, not really able to wrap my mind around what she’d described. Usually, I avoid all media as a health precaution. But, there was no way I could not be immediately drawn to hear all there was to hear about this moment that was forever changing all of our lives.
With no TV, I turned to the little computer that this year has become a part of my world. Until this week (except for brief forays during the election fracas) I’d really used it only for my website and website e-mail. Now, over the past three days, AOL, CNN, Time, CBS, and the New York Times have become my mesmerizing and quietly devastating window on the falling apart, in this country, of the world as we’ve known it.
Despite the harrowing words and horrifying photos, it was too enormous, too like a coming attraction trailer for a mega-disaster movie for the reality of it to penetrate my shock. Yet, I voraciously read and read and read every word I could find to read. I looked at all the overwhelming photos.
I kept trying to reach my sister who lives in mid-town Manhattan. I’d heard earlier from my parents in Florida that she’d gotten through to them to say she was safe and at home rather than stranded at her office in Long Island University in Brooklyn. Still, I needed to hear her voice. It was only when I actually got through to her that I finally began to feel the realness of what had happened.
As she described the scene on her street corner, my body took in the reality. She described an avenue-wide wall of people walking numbly up from downtown. People crying, holding onto each other. Many disheveled, covered in dust and soot. Cars gridlocked. An eerie stillness in the streets. A world that looked like Bosnia, Kosovo. My body reeled with the terror I imagined in the passengers in those planes, in the people trapped in the collapsing burning buildings. I cried for all the pain and suffering.
The unimaginable has happened. We have for so long felt invincible, protected, removed from the ravages of war and terrorism in one’s own geography that have long been the heritage of almost every other country in the world. We, in this terrifying moment, have lost our illusion of invulnerability. We have come of age in this crazy world. We have become a part of the world-community in ways we never believed we would.
These enormous, incomprehensible acts of terrorism shock overwhelm and terrify us. We suddenly feel incredibly vulnerable, powerless, robbed of our sense of special ness and safety. Such grief, such bereft ness. And the thief, the “enemy” in this case, as the commentators are writing, has no particular “return address.” We are enraged at this theft, at the audacity and inhumanity of these horrifying acts.
Our politicians and some of the media are fanning this rage, lathering with the need to reassert our “mastery” our “superior might,” to let them “know who they’re messing with!” The vehicle? Even bigger violence in retaliation!
I made the terrible mistake (for my soul) of reading some message boards on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The ferocity of the calls for all out violence; for wholesale vengeance; the unspeakable racist bigotry; the fury; the vulgarity of the responses to postings by more moderate, thoughtful voices; the blaring of “if you feel that way get the f… out of MY country!” I was reeling anew. The tenor of these reactions was almost more horrifying than the events that provoked them.
Over and over, I keep hearing the reverberating echo of a lyric from an old Holly Near song: “How long will we keep killing people to prove killing people is wrong?” How can we believe that more escalated violence, the retaliatory killing of another (or several other) country’s innocent civilians will do anything but perpetuate the spiral of violence? How can we believe that, were we to perpetrate such killing, we would be any more human than those we see as inhuman and despicable? How can we imagine that retaliatory violence will do anything but add further fuel to the fires of such enormously impassioned, suicidal religious extremism?
There has to be some other way! We have to find another path, a new paradigm. We cannot perpetuate this dehumanization. We need to explore the hatred, anger, desperation, powerless, disenfranchisement that spawn this dehumanization, this eruption into violence both in the terrorist and in us! We are, as a society–right this very minute–converting our sense of violation and vulnerability into the more “powerful” feeling of rageful violent intention.
One of the most powerful articles I’ve read these past three days was written by Rabbi Michael Lerner and posted on the home page of beliefnet.com “Where Does This Violence Come From?” In it Rabbi Lerner suggests that we must stop talking of “deranged minds,” (whether in terrorists foreign or domestic, children who are killing in the schools, workers “going postal,” people killing out of road rage on the freeways). Rather, he suggests, “We need to ask ourselves, ‘What is it in the way we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence plausible to so many people?’”
I don’t know if we who feel/think this way can actually stem the tide of political and media justification for retaliatory rage (the “polls” suggest that 80-90% of the general public is for all out revenge). Still, it feels important, in the current absence of any great statesmen, for us to each find our way to send a voice of reason into the collective. My friend Barbara and my friend Justine advocate for personal letters /emails to all our senators, congress people (state and federal), the President, the media and perhaps, more especially, those who provide religious/spiritual counsel. It feels like a plan to me.
I send prayers for the families of those who’ve been killed–may they be given comfort by those who love them. I send prayers for the safety of our beleaguered Arab and Muslim American citizens–may they be held safe in this climate of escalating and misguided racist hatred. I send prayers for our leaders –may they be given inspired guidance and help to transmute their rage and to find a middle way. I send prayers for a gathering of international energies and creativity to address the work of dismantling all that supports terrorism as an option.
Originally published September 2001
