9/11: the day our luck ran out
Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 09:29:56 AM PDT
This essay, dated Sept.13, 2001, is far more disturbing now than it was 6 years ago. I would have strongly preferred to be wrong.
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Last spring, our family got lucky. We traveled to Asia to adopt a child. Everywhere we went in Cambodia, people greeted our little family with one refrain: ‘Lucky baby’. They have satellite dishes now, so ‘Baywatch’ tells Cambodian peasants all about life in America.
Although they do not know anyone who can safely drink the water that comes out of the tap, anytime you want it, they do know that such things exist. They know that our daughter will be raised in a country that offers education free to all comers, girls and boys alike. They know that we need not fear malaria, cholera or land mines surprising us. No one hesitated to tell our baby that she was the lucky one.
‘Lucky mommy’, I learned to reply in deeply fractured Khmer. I saw women my age and younger, who were born in wartime and bore their first children still in wartime, and I shivered. Lucky mommy, not just because I have always had enough to eat, but because I had a childhood myself. I didn’t have to hide, watch out for mines, look for my daddy every afternoon with ever-shrinking hope. Lucky to have grown up in peace and prosperity, in the luckiest country on the planet.
On Tuesday, our luck ran out. When I saw the crumbling towers and realized that they had just become this planet’s most reported story, with a breathtaking video clip, I thought first: I hope the running people make it. Then: I wonder what my child’s birth family will think of this.
In a hut in a village in rural Cambodia, they will watch the debris cloud via satellite on a TV powered by a diesel generator. They will see that American luck has run out at last, that we have been baptized into the larger human family by the explosion of political violence into a random Tuesday. Now our country has become more like theirs, in a subtle reversal of the ‘Americanization’ we took for a trend.
I worry that they will feel, as I do in the darkness of insomnia, that somehow we have failed them. We promised that we would bring the baby home to America, where nothing they fear would touch her. Of course we’ll do our best to keep her safe. But my response to the rumbling of F-15s and cargo transport planes is to buy a white noise machine for the baby’s room so she can sleep through the night. I wonder whether I’m really up to it, whether I can raise this child the way I’d dreamed before Tuesday, back when terrorism was something I’d seen in Spain once when I was younger.
The sky trembles every few minutes above our home in the desert. When we bought the house last spring, our proximity to the Air Force base was irrelevant; we were focused on a short commute to the airport for business travel. That seems silly today. Our planes are revving constantly, off to bomb another country back to the Stone Age, to show them that we won’t be pushed around, that we’re the most powerful country in the world.
As though people in the failed states that spawn terrorism don’t know this. As though our power had escaped their consciousness, and we must make a big enough explosion to prove the point that we have better-fed Marines and longer-range gunboats than everyone else.
I’ve been to the Stone Age recently. And these days I feel that I should be shouting my observations at my fellow citizens of the Space Age, hoping that a loud enough repetition can get attention onto the only relevant issue: The destitute majority on this planet, living in countries most of us can’t find on a map, are people who we can’t ‘bomb back to the Stone Age’ because they already live there.
Our might has no hold over them, and our threats do not add to their fears, because they are already living terrorized by problems we’ve forgotten about. Mothers in Afghanistan have to fear the water, for God’s sake. I don’t mean that they fear their children will drown, I mean they fear that the baby will get microbial diarrhea and die quickly and quietly. The possibility that the sky will begin to fall next week on these women does not cause the Taliban to quake, and it’s no wonder.
The most surprised person I have ever met was a 26-year-old Cambodian man, a taxi driver, who had never heard of the concept ‘only child’. When I answered his questions about my family of origin, he checked his English by asking in French: And the others? My mother’s choice to stop her childbearing, confident that both her closely spaced daughters would live to adulthood, was not a test of his language comprehension. It was a test of his willingness to learn about a truly foreign place with foreign ways. To his credit, he figured out that we had a cultural gap, not a vocabulary problem, far more quickly than I did.
I feel badly for the stunned Americans who say that they can’t imagine why anyone would want to bomb us. My heart breaks when I realize that they are sincere, not cynical; they are honestly unaware of the gap between our nation’s way of life and the reality of life on this planet for the majority of humans.
If we are determined not to understand, if our willingness to grasp the complexity of our connected planet is less sage than Duc, the cabbie in Phnom Penh, we will be equally stunned by whatever they hit us with next. And they will hit us again, no matter what we do to show them who’s boss.
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