September 15, 2011
Early last Friday evening, my friend Judy and I were walking down Tenth Avenue near 23rd Street in Chelsea. We passed a U-Haul van pulled over to the curb with a police car, lights flashing, behind it. The driver stood next to his vehicle, being questioned by the officers.
"See that?" said Judy. "It's 9/11 paranoia. I had to drive around the city all day today, and the traffic was snarled everywhere by all the searches. I lived downtown ten years ago, and I saw the towers fall. All this stuff just brings back the horror, and I don't need it. What good does it do? Why can't we just move on?"
It's like scratching a scab.
"This whole thing is just what happened right after the attacks," she continued, "the orange alerts and stuff. Today I heard the government had, quote, ‘credible evidence' that Al Qaeda was planning to bomb the tunnels and subways and the police were looking for two American Arabs. Then in the same breath they said they had no specifics. It's all done to keep us fearful."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a similar point on his Friday radio show. "We've got to make sure we don't let the terrorists take away our rights without any terrorism," he said. "If you lock yourself in your house because you're scared, they're winning. If you don't let somebody else pray or say what they want to say or you deny any rights to certain people — that's exactly what they want. I don't think we should do that."
A word of good sense. Of course, he and his police chief Ray Kelly ordered the searches. As one anonymous law enforcement official told the New York Times, the plot "could all be one big fabrication, but no one wants to take any chances."
I suppose you can't be too careful, and I myself had mixed feelings of revulsion and relief watching the NYPD deal with the man in the van.
That's the nature of terrorism. It's like those poltergeist movies: Your skin crawls because you never know when and how the killer will strike; you don't even know who or what the killer is. No matter how strong you are or what actions you take, you feel impotent in the face of the unknown. You want to direct your seething rage, but there is nowhere to direct it. You want to protect yourself from another attack, but the enemy is a phantom.
Just look at the government's responses to 9/11 over the last decade: Another bloated bureaucracy with the still-eerie name of Homeland Security (Fatherland and Motherland having already been taken); two military invasions with loss of innocent life exponentially greater than that on our shores; practices of torture that got no results and only defiled America's sense of decency and integrity; a monstrous airport security apparatus that keeps the country in a constant low-level state of anxiety and fear.
Whether or not any of these actions, costing trillions of dollars and untold damage to body and spirit, has been effective, we'll never know. How many of the rumored plots were real, and how many were "fabrications"? Most of the ones we know were real, like the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, and that goofball who set his truck on fire in Times Square, were thwarted by the bumbling perpetrators themselves.
Unlike the movies, there is no ending, no resolution. Even the assassination of Bin Laden last May, shamelessly gloated over by our President, brought no relief, only a momentary release of frustration and a shallow burst of flag-waving. No V-J Day here.
It's to the credit of the American people, imbued with the spirit of freedom and equality and chastened by memories of lynchings and interments, that this anxiety, fear, and pent-up rage have not, except at the fringes, been released on the Muslim community. The angels of our better nature, up to now at least, appear to be winning.
The tenth anniversary ceremonies, and the telling and re- telling of stories of tragic loss and unparalleled heroism that occupied the media in the weeks preceding, were acts of catharsis, a form of therapy for our collective post-traumatic stress disorder. The focus of most of it was not against enemies, whoever they were and may be, but toward the resilience of the human spirit in the face of disaster, no matter what the cause.
Now it is over for a while again, but it is never really over. What we must do, as Judy said, is move on.
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
9/11: COLLATERAL DAMAGE
September 8, 2011
The terrorist attacks of ten years ago left untold scars on the American psyche. When the towers fell, whole worldviews fell with them.
My friend Jim first heard the news when he returned to his office at a small college here in New York after his class on Buddhism. The study of comparative religions had been good to Jim; twenty years in the academic saddle had allowed him and his wife Sarah to buy a big apartment on the Upper West Side before the area became desirable and to give their two children a privileged education. He'd turned 54 the day before; another decade or so of grading papers, updating his syllabi, and grumbling about the administration would bring him a happy retirement — maybe a farmette in the Poconos, where he could grow masses of vegetables and write the book he never had time for before.
He'd majored in religion not in hopes of a career but in hopes of a revelation. He'd been a skeptic from his youth, yet he was drawn to religious ideas; somewhere in that tangle must lie the key to self-discovery.
What he loved was the Big Questions, from the existence of God to the existence of evil to existence after death, and as a teacher he performed more like a lawyer in a courtroom or Socrates in the Agora, confounding every facile argument and prodding his students to think, damn you, think.
His own quest for God was never fulfilled. "Religious systems have a lovely symmetry," he told me years ago, "but I'm not sure they have a referent."
Before grad school and before his marriage, he'd spent a year in a Zen monastery in upstate New York, seeking satori, that flash of enlightenment where the mind, as one master put it, is as clear as a polished mirror. But of course, the more you long for satori, the less likely it will come.
A type of satori hit him that day. In his course on Buddhism he had been discussing the "Four Passing Sights" which would eventually turn the young Siddhartha Gautama into the Enlightened One: an aged person, a diseased person, a corpse, and a peaceful ascetic. He had taken his students into the hallway of the building, where photographs of graduating classes dating back almost a century were displayed. "Look carefully at these faces," he told them. "They're just like you. Work backwards: Class of 2000, 1970, 1940, 1910. Where are these people now? In fact, who were they at all?"
Pleased with the sobering results of his presentation, he returned to the faculty building to find his colleagues huddled around the television in the history chair's office. "This is the end of America as we've known it," she prophesied. "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
Jim knew no one who worked in the Twin Towers, but many of his former core-curriculum students had taken jobs around Wall Street. Where are they now? Later he learned that the husband of one of them had perished in the collapse.
Like many of us that night, he and his wife lay sleepless. Their children, both away at college, had called to ask if everything was all right with them. "Physically, yes," he told them. "Spiritually, I don't know."
"In all my years of teaching," he confided to me some years ago, "I never painted a pristine picture of religion. From the Book of Joshua to the crusades to the jihads, I felt students needed to reflect on the dark side of religion. It was a contradiction I could not solve, but to me then it was just another intellectual question. I'd became something of a Manichean, thinking that there must be a fixed quantity of evil in the human collective; when it's tamped down in one place, it erupts in another, like vulcanism.
"That night, my uneasy peace with religious violence began to unravel. When my students asked me next class what I thought of the disasters, my rhetorical skills vanished. All I could say was ‘I don't know.'
"That semester was literally horrible for me. The questions that had fascinated me all my life became absurdities. I kept thinking of that line by the devil Nickles in J.B. by Archibald MacLeish — his free-verse play on the Book of Job: ‘If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He is not God.'
"The only thing that made sense were the syllables of Hindu mystics. At the end of their journey, all they could say about God was ‘Neti, neti' — ‘Not this, not this.' How can you teach a course when all you have is one word?"
Jim quit teaching two years later and bought a half-interest in a neighborhood wine shop. He and Sarah travel to Europe at least once a year, picking up bargains.
Except on rare occasions, he never mentions religion.
The terrorist attacks of ten years ago left untold scars on the American psyche. When the towers fell, whole worldviews fell with them.
My friend Jim first heard the news when he returned to his office at a small college here in New York after his class on Buddhism. The study of comparative religions had been good to Jim; twenty years in the academic saddle had allowed him and his wife Sarah to buy a big apartment on the Upper West Side before the area became desirable and to give their two children a privileged education. He'd turned 54 the day before; another decade or so of grading papers, updating his syllabi, and grumbling about the administration would bring him a happy retirement — maybe a farmette in the Poconos, where he could grow masses of vegetables and write the book he never had time for before.
He'd majored in religion not in hopes of a career but in hopes of a revelation. He'd been a skeptic from his youth, yet he was drawn to religious ideas; somewhere in that tangle must lie the key to self-discovery.
What he loved was the Big Questions, from the existence of God to the existence of evil to existence after death, and as a teacher he performed more like a lawyer in a courtroom or Socrates in the Agora, confounding every facile argument and prodding his students to think, damn you, think.
His own quest for God was never fulfilled. "Religious systems have a lovely symmetry," he told me years ago, "but I'm not sure they have a referent."
Before grad school and before his marriage, he'd spent a year in a Zen monastery in upstate New York, seeking satori, that flash of enlightenment where the mind, as one master put it, is as clear as a polished mirror. But of course, the more you long for satori, the less likely it will come.
A type of satori hit him that day. In his course on Buddhism he had been discussing the "Four Passing Sights" which would eventually turn the young Siddhartha Gautama into the Enlightened One: an aged person, a diseased person, a corpse, and a peaceful ascetic. He had taken his students into the hallway of the building, where photographs of graduating classes dating back almost a century were displayed. "Look carefully at these faces," he told them. "They're just like you. Work backwards: Class of 2000, 1970, 1940, 1910. Where are these people now? In fact, who were they at all?"
Pleased with the sobering results of his presentation, he returned to the faculty building to find his colleagues huddled around the television in the history chair's office. "This is the end of America as we've known it," she prophesied. "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
Jim knew no one who worked in the Twin Towers, but many of his former core-curriculum students had taken jobs around Wall Street. Where are they now? Later he learned that the husband of one of them had perished in the collapse.
Like many of us that night, he and his wife lay sleepless. Their children, both away at college, had called to ask if everything was all right with them. "Physically, yes," he told them. "Spiritually, I don't know."
"In all my years of teaching," he confided to me some years ago, "I never painted a pristine picture of religion. From the Book of Joshua to the crusades to the jihads, I felt students needed to reflect on the dark side of religion. It was a contradiction I could not solve, but to me then it was just another intellectual question. I'd became something of a Manichean, thinking that there must be a fixed quantity of evil in the human collective; when it's tamped down in one place, it erupts in another, like vulcanism.
"That night, my uneasy peace with religious violence began to unravel. When my students asked me next class what I thought of the disasters, my rhetorical skills vanished. All I could say was ‘I don't know.'
"That semester was literally horrible for me. The questions that had fascinated me all my life became absurdities. I kept thinking of that line by the devil Nickles in J.B. by Archibald MacLeish — his free-verse play on the Book of Job: ‘If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He is not God.'
"The only thing that made sense were the syllables of Hindu mystics. At the end of their journey, all they could say about God was ‘Neti, neti' — ‘Not this, not this.' How can you teach a course when all you have is one word?"
Jim quit teaching two years later and bought a half-interest in a neighborhood wine shop. He and Sarah travel to Europe at least once a year, picking up bargains.
Except on rare occasions, he never mentions religion.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
TRAUMA
September 11, 2008
The memories, now that I’ve decided to write about the subject, come back in horrific floods: the morning news bulletin that a plane had collided with one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center and the initial talk of a "terrible accident"; then a second plane, and talk of terrorism; fuzzy long-distance shots of people jumping stories to their deaths, then the imploding towers; further bulletins of planes crashing into the Pentagon and some field in Pennsylvania; the column of smoke visible for days from the rooftops of the Bronx, ten miles to the north; the endless TV replays interspersed with live footage of people wandering dazed on the downtown streets with photos of the missing; the tolling bell and candle-light service at St. Augustine Catholic Church here, two days after the tragedy; the old woman who took my hand and whispered, "It’s Judgment Day."
There were few physical casualties here in the South Bronx, but everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who had died in the cataclysm. A teacher at St. Augustine School, a former police officer, lost her sister in the towers and broke apart; after five years on disability, she returned to teaching, sharing her story of overcoming grief with hope and hatred with love.
Keith Outlaw, the young African-American pastor of St. Augustine’s, carried out his duties in a haze. "For days and days," he told me recently, "people would come to me in tears, and I tried to be strong for them. Then when they left I’d cry. I was really hurting. I cried so much during that whole period. It was beyond what we could ever imagine."
He did his part.
"When they called for clergy to bless remains in the morgues," he said, "I signed up. But so many had volunteered that I was pushed back to the second week. When I finally got there, I prepared myself to see bodies or large body parts, and the staff there warned us and gave us special headgear for the stench — but I didn’t need it. What came through by that time was just little bits of bone — the biggest I saw was about five or six inches long. There was no stench because there was no flesh — all the bones looked like they’d been in the desert for years. The doctor on duty told me the fire was like a thousand degrees — they were cooked.
"Of course at that point, they couldn’t identify the persons those bones belonged to, so there wasn’t much to be done. I said some prayers and that was it."
Jesus taught his followers to love and forgive those who hate them. How did he feel at the time?
"The love and forgiveness part was never there, to be honest. I was very angry and very hurt: How could they do this to them?"
"The only good thing I can say is that it really united people. Here in New York, the mood was so different from usual. People were actually kind to each other. We weren’t rich or poor, Republicans or Democrats, Catholics or even Muslims — we were all Americans."
It was the small things that often spoke the loudest to him.
"I remember watching a Red Sox-Yankee game in Boston that fall, and some fans unveiled a banner that read, ‘The Red Sox Love New York.’ Has that ever happened before or since?"
Another small thing: "I remember buying bananas from Colombia or someplace around that time, and the little sticker on them had the Colombian and U.S. flags crossed together and the words, ‘We are with you.’ We had the whole world behind us then.
"That was until Iraq. We were all united until Bush finished us off."
I would say that Iraq didn’t start the finishing off; that had been going on almost from the beginning.
It was a time of national trauma, and as with individual trauma, the country felt both angry and helpless at once, and looked to their leaders for support and guidance. As the woman said, it seemed like Judgment Day. But it was not so much a day of judgment as it was a day for judgment, the ability of true leaders to accurately evaluate a situation in the midst of the chaos, take visionary action, and inspire hope and trust. In the years following the tragedy, what we got from our leaders was the Office of Homeland Security, the Orange Alerts that only heightened the trauma, the squandering of the enormous capital of good will by an abrasive, go-it-alone foreign policy — and then Iraq, and domestic surveillance, and torture, and military tribunals, to all of which the country and its legislators passively acceded: the sure signs of ongoing trauma.
It’s been seven years, and Keith Outlaw continues to hurt.
"There’s still a wound there that probably will heal in time," he told me. "It’s less painful now, but it opens again every September."
Personally and politically, 9/11 is not behind us yet.
The memories, now that I’ve decided to write about the subject, come back in horrific floods: the morning news bulletin that a plane had collided with one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center and the initial talk of a "terrible accident"; then a second plane, and talk of terrorism; fuzzy long-distance shots of people jumping stories to their deaths, then the imploding towers; further bulletins of planes crashing into the Pentagon and some field in Pennsylvania; the column of smoke visible for days from the rooftops of the Bronx, ten miles to the north; the endless TV replays interspersed with live footage of people wandering dazed on the downtown streets with photos of the missing; the tolling bell and candle-light service at St. Augustine Catholic Church here, two days after the tragedy; the old woman who took my hand and whispered, "It’s Judgment Day."
There were few physical casualties here in the South Bronx, but everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who had died in the cataclysm. A teacher at St. Augustine School, a former police officer, lost her sister in the towers and broke apart; after five years on disability, she returned to teaching, sharing her story of overcoming grief with hope and hatred with love.
Keith Outlaw, the young African-American pastor of St. Augustine’s, carried out his duties in a haze. "For days and days," he told me recently, "people would come to me in tears, and I tried to be strong for them. Then when they left I’d cry. I was really hurting. I cried so much during that whole period. It was beyond what we could ever imagine."
He did his part.
"When they called for clergy to bless remains in the morgues," he said, "I signed up. But so many had volunteered that I was pushed back to the second week. When I finally got there, I prepared myself to see bodies or large body parts, and the staff there warned us and gave us special headgear for the stench — but I didn’t need it. What came through by that time was just little bits of bone — the biggest I saw was about five or six inches long. There was no stench because there was no flesh — all the bones looked like they’d been in the desert for years. The doctor on duty told me the fire was like a thousand degrees — they were cooked.
"Of course at that point, they couldn’t identify the persons those bones belonged to, so there wasn’t much to be done. I said some prayers and that was it."
Jesus taught his followers to love and forgive those who hate them. How did he feel at the time?
"The love and forgiveness part was never there, to be honest. I was very angry and very hurt: How could they do this to them?"
"The only good thing I can say is that it really united people. Here in New York, the mood was so different from usual. People were actually kind to each other. We weren’t rich or poor, Republicans or Democrats, Catholics or even Muslims — we were all Americans."
It was the small things that often spoke the loudest to him.
"I remember watching a Red Sox-Yankee game in Boston that fall, and some fans unveiled a banner that read, ‘The Red Sox Love New York.’ Has that ever happened before or since?"
Another small thing: "I remember buying bananas from Colombia or someplace around that time, and the little sticker on them had the Colombian and U.S. flags crossed together and the words, ‘We are with you.’ We had the whole world behind us then.
"That was until Iraq. We were all united until Bush finished us off."
I would say that Iraq didn’t start the finishing off; that had been going on almost from the beginning.
It was a time of national trauma, and as with individual trauma, the country felt both angry and helpless at once, and looked to their leaders for support and guidance. As the woman said, it seemed like Judgment Day. But it was not so much a day of judgment as it was a day for judgment, the ability of true leaders to accurately evaluate a situation in the midst of the chaos, take visionary action, and inspire hope and trust. In the years following the tragedy, what we got from our leaders was the Office of Homeland Security, the Orange Alerts that only heightened the trauma, the squandering of the enormous capital of good will by an abrasive, go-it-alone foreign policy — and then Iraq, and domestic surveillance, and torture, and military tribunals, to all of which the country and its legislators passively acceded: the sure signs of ongoing trauma.
It’s been seven years, and Keith Outlaw continues to hurt.
"There’s still a wound there that probably will heal in time," he told me. "It’s less painful now, but it opens again every September."
Personally and politically, 9/11 is not behind us yet.
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