What comes below the fold is something I wrote shortly after 9/11. It has not been edited much, especially as it helps me to revisit where we were at the time. Fox News barely existed and there was no MSNBC. The President referred to is George Bush II. If anyone knows where I could get copies of the film clips I refer to, I would appreciate it, especially the one of Bush saying we had to give up some of our soul.
Strange days have found us, indeed.
On the strangest of recent strange days the first thing that really reached me, after the strangeness had struck me numb, was a woman on television. She was on the television because she had walked out of the first tower after it was hit. I think that she was actually on the TV before the towers had collapsed, because she seemed relatively calm. She was not the sort of person you often see on the television, she looked like a lot of women we see daily sitting behind desks in offices, usually the front desk. She spoke very well, she was very composed and articulate about the evacuation and her feelings. When she was done describing her escape she said something very significant, so significant that it was the first thing I really remember.
The woman turned to the camera and said, very sincerely, something to the effect that, "You who did this, you may not like our country, or something that we did to you, and I'm sorry that we did it to you. Maybe we should even stop doing it." And then she said the words, "But at least we don't intentionally bomb women and children!" At this moment, something way down in the bottom of her conscience cried out, so she hesitated, and then she said, "At least, I hope we don't bomb women and children!" She had the look on her face of a child who can't remember an answer in class, but suspects she has guessed wrong.
Seeing her say this, looking at her face, I felt that she was very sincere. She really hoped that we didn't bomb women and children. She just couldn't quite remember if she had heard that we bomb women and children or not.
Now, much has been made in recent years about the censorship of mainstream news in the U.S., but even the mainstream news admits that we knowingly bomb women and children, in government buildings in Iraq and the market of Kosovo, for starters. We may call it "collateral damage", but the fact is we drop the bombs knowing on whom they will fall. I would like to shoot rabbits off of my front porch, but no one will allow me to, because it would mean shooting towards the road, and that would endanger the people on the road, and no one would accept the argument that I was actually aiming at a rabbit if a person in a car was hit.
As for our policy towards women and children, bombing is, in some ways, the least horrific thing we do. Starvation and freezing to death, economic displacement, dysentery, being herded up and executed by death squads, our foreign policy has included a lot of terrorized women and children over the last few decades. The way the woman hesitated showed that she has, on some level, received this information. What was illustrated by this woman's words was that she was censoring this information herself. She had forgotten.
Now, I ask you, what does it mean to forget such pieces of information? Shouldn't the news that your government is not benevolent make some sort of painful impression, if you have a real sense of decency? This pain is called, "The pang of conscience" for a reason, it is meant to get your attention like the blow of a whip. You are supposed to start thinking seriously about how you should not do the thing causing you a pang. How was it that this woman's conscience was not sufficient to keep her painfully aware that our national record on the treatment of women and children was not so good?
Unfortunately, as a people we don't have a high tolerance for suffering. We have succeeded better than any society before us at isolating ourselves from physical pain and fear and we would like to do the same with emotional pain. We find rationalizations to doubt the painful information or disassociate ourselves from it. I think that this woman's very decency and compassion made the information that we bomb women and children too painful for her to assimilate, so she had shunted it off somewhere. Only her conscience remembered and made her hesitate.
The destruction of the Twin Towers, didn't we already see that in "Godzilla"? Or was that "Independence Day"? Or both? How often do we get to see the moment that a person's conscience is suppressed? How often do we get to see the moment when a nation turns away from itself in horror? They should have replayed the clip of that woman over and over again. Most people on the television today learned how to completely stifle their consciences a long time ago, they aren't going through the process on camera. That woman was unique.
I want to emphasize that the woman on the TV seemed like a really good woman, whose first thought was to acknowledge that we might have had some role in bringing 9-11 about. She seemed like the kind of person who is going to help you if you come into her office looking for help, a useful person, a kind person. Maybe she really couldn't afford to think too much about what goes on in the sphere of "American Interests" because it would keep her awake at night and she wouldn't be able to do her job and help the people who come into her office. What else could she do? After all, she wasn't about to become some sort of political person, those people are too weird.
Is this all that is left of our American Decency? We are too decent and compassionate to face up to our own painful role in the world or to engage in the chancy endeavor of changing it? We may have been the Beacon of Freedom in a theoretical sense, especially for a few European and Asian countries after WWII, or for those individuals who could leave their own countries and come here. However, in a practical sense our foreign policies have resulted in oppression and terror for a much larger segment of the world before and since. The devil is in the details, and once you know the details you realize that our legacy in toto is not very nice. Maybe it is better than that of many World Powers, but I don't think injustice is graded on a curve. At the most injustice will cancel out the good we have done and we will have to face the music for a foreign policy designed to put the wealth of other nations into our leader's pockets. Until more of us can face up to this legacy, we are doomed to continue the spiral of injustice and counter injustice that has brought us to this point.
The Catch-22 in our predicament is that the worse the News, the more likely it is going to overwhelm our consciences and get forgotten. Nowadays almost all the News is so outrageous that most of it is dismissed as too disturbing to air. What airs, seems to be forgotten almost immediately. Anyone who was surprised by 9-11 hasn't really been paying attention to the news. Any news, even CNN.
Once upon a time, many years ago, rumors and pamphlets and soap box speakers exaggerated any story as it passed around, until any tale oft told was sure to be an exaggeration. Unfortunately, the days when the news was worse than reality are long gone; nowadays the news is just the tip of the iceberg. Even organs of the liberal side of the press, such as NPR or certain major national magazines, keep their coverage within an accepted range of opinions, issues and details. The same few details are passed around the "newsrooms" and the worst of the details, the who did what to whom, is only reported in the most rabid of the left wing media. Everyone else is too busy trying to make themselves sound "reasonable", and you simply can't do it and report the truth anymore, because the truth is really unreasonable! Speak too much of the truth, and you will be labeled "leftist extremist" faster than you can say "neo-conservative".
The irony of the current case is that we have chosen the terror of being attacked by our enemies over the terror of facing up to our consciences. Fear of Death is not as scary as Fear of Our Own Evil. The evil consequence of this situation is that many people have given up all serious attempts to understand what is going on. There is really no other explanation for an 80% approval rating for President Bush's pursuit of the War on Terrorism. Thank God that period of "fooling all of the people all the time" appears to be coming to an end.
Could this group stilling of our consciences in a time of danger be what President Bush meant when he said we might have to give up some of our soul? How obscenely his tongue rolled around that word, that sacred word, as though our soul was already in his mouth and he was deciding whether to swallow it or just chew it up and spit it out. Someone more important said, "What profit it a man if he gain the world, and lose his immortal soul?"
The other image I remember from September 11th was of a young man who was interviewed as he walked away from the Towers. He was not as articulate as the woman, perhaps because he was still escaping. His voice trembled, and his eyes were troubled. They asked him if he was afraid, and he said that, of course, he was afraid, but then he gathered himself and said, "What I am most afraid of is what our reaction will be."
Even in the face of death, this person could see the trajectory of suffering, and he knew that our capacity to spread suffering exceeds that of a band of terrorists, even terrorists attacking him, personally. Here was someone who could hold onto his conscience, the crown jewel of what ever we have that can claim the name of "soul", at the moment it really counted. May the spirit of this young man and the others like him prevail, and may we not loose one jot or tittle of our precious, fragile and all too fallible soul. It’s the only thing that really makes this enterprise, this nation worth anything. Without it, there is no "we" worth speaking of.