My life to date, it seems, has been marked by more than its share of days and hours that are indelibly marked in memory: the "I'll never forget where I was/what I was doing when..." moments. I was born a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, while my father was in South Korea manning a radar station during the Vietnam War. I was just shy of a month old when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. (I was on my mother's lap in my grandmother's living room in Ohio, being fed mashed bananas, while grandma watched her favorite soap opera, when the news came in.)
I don't consciously remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy (I wasn't quite 5), or the Kent State massacre (I was 6½). I do remember casualty reports and body counts from Vietnam being a regular part of the news when I was young, and wondering whether they included any of the young men who had hired my mom to type their theses and dissertations and then lost their student deferments when they graduated.
I do remember Watergate, though not where I was at each stage of the investigation or when Nixon announced his resignation. I remember the chaos when we pulled out of Vietnam and when Saigon fell. I remember the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, along with the hostage crisis that dragged on for more than a year afterward. I remember the 1973 oil embargo, and the long lines in front of gas stations that year. (I also remember when gasoline cost around 40 cents a gallon.)
I remember when one of my fellow students, in my senior year of high school, came to school on the first Wednesday after the first Monday in November wearing one of her grandmother's old mourning dresses, complete with full-length black veil, to "commemorate" the election of Ronald Reagan. (And I remember wishing I could have done likewise, because I shared her dismay at the results of the election.) I remember driving that same fellow student to the church we both attended to pray for the pope on the day he was shot.
President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada the day after my 20th birthday, in my sophomore year of college. I was at work on the morning the Challenger blew up shortly after launch. I was getting ready to start graduate school (and recovering from mononucleosis) the summer of the Iran-Contra hearings. I was in my first semester of a Ph.D. program when the Berlin Wall fell. When the first Gulf War started, a year and a bit later, I was in a different graduate program. (And enjoying the ability conferred by this new thing called the Internet--still mainly a scientific and academic enterprise in those pre-AOL days--to chat live in real-time with people on the ground in Israel and other war zones, getting breaking news even before the broadcast networks had it.)
I had a business meeting in Chicago on Election Day 2000, and I remember listening to NPR's election coverage as I drove home late that night. First they announced that Gore appeared to have won, then that the outcome was still in question. By the time I went to bed after midnight, they were calling it for Bush.
Three years ago today, I was at my office when word came in that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York. Few of us got much work done that day: most of us were glued to televisions, radios, or the Internet in stunned disbelief (I had streaming audio from the BBC on my desktop nearly the whole day), following the developments as they happened.
A year ago February, I woke up one Saturday morning to the news that another space shuttle, the Columbia, had blown up on re-entry. And now I wait for the outcome of what may be the most momentous election in our nation's history.
Today is a date that will live in infamy, every bit as much as 7 December 1941 will. But it is our choice how we will remember that infamy. I have little taste for the official designation of today as "Patriot Day." The men who perpetrated this act of heinous evil were not patriots in any accepted sense of the word, and most of their victims were ordinary citizens of this nation--and many others--who were merely going about their everyday tasks.
And this is not really the day for exaltation of national pride, for jingoistic speeches or behavior, or "my country, right or wrong" rhetoric. We should spend less time thumping our chests (or beating the drums of war), and more time plumbing the depths of our own souls, and hardening our resolve that the events of 11 September 2001 shall never happen again.
The current slogan at Pandagon is "we only look young." I think Jesse Taylor proved that abundantly today when he wrote the following:
The lesson I drew from September 11th wasn't about vengeance, retribution, remaking the world through might and money. It was that we are facing people who destroy for a purpose worse than no purpose at all. And if we are to fight them, to turn the world against them, we must fight in a way that is a total and utter repudiation of them. That's not just moral or ethical; it includes their political goals as well. We can't stop them from being a political force simply by killing them - their ideology thrives on an enemy to destroy, and raising the conviction in others that the enemy is worth of being destroyed as well. Our actions matter because we are not operating in a framework where we will simply be taken at our word because we are good and just; we must prove it in the face of an enemy working to convince the world that the exact opposite is true, and do so in order to gain very real political power.
They are our enemy because they kill indiscriminately and without remorse; we must not be the same way. They value the lives of those who follow them only in terms of how much damage they can do; we value the lives of our soldiers and our citizens as those who fight for peace, for prosperity, for enlightenment, whose existence is valuable because of how they can make life better, not how much death they can cause. They view the world as a conflict between those they can bully and those they must destroy; we must, we have to view the world as a conflict between those who can help and those who would hurt.
As for me, I'm passing the day studying the aftermath of a couple of other wars, watching a little tennis, reading the blogs and the news online. But I'll be thinking of the words Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, wrote in the aftermath of that terrible day three years ago (available as a prayer card from Pax Christi USA):
Prayer in Time of Terrorism
O God, I do not know where to turn in a time of terrorism. I have no easy answers or solutions to acts of terror against the innocent. When buildings explode without warning, when the defenseless are murdered without reason, I am tempted to retaliate with vengeance. I am tempted to place the flag above the cross and put my faith in the state rather than the Sermon on the Mount. I am afraid to face my deepest fears of suffering and death, both for myself and those I love.
O God, be merciful to me a sinner and understand my weakness, my lack of trust. I lift my heart to a God of forgiveness, of compassion, of peace. I believe that You are not present in any act of violence. I believe that every human being is a child of God and that all nations and religions are embraced by You. I believe that violence ignites greater violence and that in the long line of history our only lasting legacy is love.
I recommit myself to nonviolence as a witness of Your love. I will cast out fear and boldly live love for neighbor and enemy. I will cast out fear and renounce hatred, desire for revenge and works of war. I will cast out fear and publicly proclaim that You are a God of unlimited and unconditional love.
I recommit myself to nonviolence as a witness of Your love. I will embrace the suffering of others and wipe every tear from their eyes. I will devote my days to works of mercy and justice, not to deeds of death and destruction. I will give my passion to kindness and beauty and imagination. I commit to hope and the children of tomorrow.
Amen.
*The title of this post is a line from the Offertory of the Requiem Mass: Hostias et preces tibi, Domine, laudis offerimus: tu suscipe pro animabus illis quarum hodie memoriam facimus... ("We offer to you, O Lord, a sacrifice of prayer and praise: receive it on behalf of those souls whom we commemorate this day...").
(Cross-posted from my blog.)