The hole that swallowed so much of ourselves.
Those who do not weep, do not see. Victor Hugo
Chase away sorrow by living. Melissa Marr
Twenty years ago we were credulous and blundering. Now we’re sour, suspicious and lacking in discernible ideals. Michelle Goldberg
Half the night I waste in sighs. Alfred Tennyson
Every angel is terrifying. Rainer Maria Rilke
Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger? Arundhati Roy
Terror had them all for a moment, and it ravaged them, and when it was finished, shock had its way with them, and left them cold and helpless. Dean Wilson
As these years of weekly posts begin to wind down towards a culmination of sorts later this year in Advent, the question of what is left to say looms large for me. Our global community is literally drowning now in opinion and commentary of all stripes and conclusions, opinions more or less attentive to circumstances around their owners, more or less grounded in reality, more or less helpful in moving the needle towards healthier, more peaceful futures.
Commentary for us has never been a competition. We don’t make money from it. We don’t brand it. We also don’t believe that ours is the only way for the policy community to proceed. Instead, we’ve looked for fertile entry points for ideas that are surely not always our own but that deserve to be considered as policy is crafted and implemented. Amidst a cacophony of “interested” opinions, we have never had an interest beyond creating cultures of policy more conducive to honoring promises to those who have felt the blunt end of armed conflict and other ills for far too long.
As this interest unfolds, it is sometimes valuable to find a platform a bit outside the fray. We have ideas to promote, but we are not salespeople engaged in zero sum activities – my product or yours in the basket on its way to checkout. The point of sharing ideas in policy settings is to make better ideas, more responsive ideas, more accountable ideas. The exercise is – or should be – complementary not predatory. We don’t “win” in this business. The only question of relevance in this work is whether or not our constituencies win.
Apologies for the digression, but it is important as background to what will be attempted here – a modest contribution to a seemingly endless stream of commentary on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I’ve been reading quite a bit of other people’s ideas this week – mostly emanating from a grief in some ways larger than the twin towers, a grief motivated by the reality that, 20 years on, the bombs are still falling, the ethnic violence persists, the famines rage, the vaccines are yet to be distributed, the conspiracies and stiff-necked perspectives continue to multiply, the children still search for comfort in a world which, in some key ways, is simply not fit for them.
My own grief is only one grief among millions and perhaps among the more self-indulgent of them. Like many of you, I have my own 9/11 stories, but these pale among the stories of that “first truth,” those whose loved ones went to work that day and never returned; the firefighters and police ascending stairs in the towers that were about to collapse around them; their colleagues sifting through rubble that would jeopardize their mental and physical well-being for the rest of their earthly lives; the passengers struggling with kidnappers to divert a deadly flight over Pennsylvania knowing that their own fates were largely sealed; the people from a distance who watched helplessly as the last vestiges of their “national security” came unraveled, a security which, whatever its merits, would never feel quite the same as the towers fell and victims jumped to their deaths.
This is the always the first truth of armed conflict, whether conducted by gunships or commercial aircraft, whether taking place in Lower Manhattan or in central Kabul. The human toll of conflict is as ubiquitous as it is persistent. We pause to remember, even to shed tears, because a generation later there are still many holes to fill, holes as large as those at the center of the 9/11 Memorial; places at the family table still being held for those who will never again occupy them, but also the struggles of responders and others whose lungs have still not expelled the toxins in the rubble, have still not fully come to terms with what they saw and heard as they sifted through a gnarly aftermath that produced numerous corpses and poisonous exposures.
This is the first and most important truth of 9/11 but it is not the only one. For the misery we experience is tied inextricably, in this instance and others, to the misery we inflict in turn. 9/11 was not the alpha moment of global conflict, but was one point in a long chain of violence, retribution, righteous indignation, nationalistic fervor and self-justifying aggression that, in the case of the US and other major powers, had long taken a consequential toll greater than the conflicts to which it was pegged, violence which was often alleged to be “preventive” in nature but which we have come to realize has bred more of the threat our sophisticated weaponry was allegedly intended to mitigate.
This second truth is the truth about us, about what we did in response to 9/11, what we have justified in the name of those collapsed buildings, and what that justification has uncovered and unleashed in ourselves. We remain grateful to those who have helped ensure that, over 20 years, it has been safe to fly in airplanes and take long elevator rides to the top of our ever-larger office towers. We should also be grateful for those at the UN who pursue elements of counter-terror policy – promoting border controls and aviation safety, ensuring accountability for terror crimes and addressing the uneasy status of Foreign Terror Fighters – all with the understanding that basic human rights must always be protected, that we cannot remove a blight on the global commons by adding to the volume of abuse ourselves.
At the same time, we have become a people, certainly often in the US, who more and more seem intent on “eating its young,” a people suspicious to the core of everything but our own motives, a people whose movements are constantly scrutinized in the name of “security” but whose freedom “red line” is not the powers that manipulate our tastes and violate our privacy but those who insist on basic hygiene to ward off a deadly pandemic; a people who routinely tolerate deadly violence undertaken in their name so long as it doesn’t screw up Sunday church or karaoke night; a people at war with ourselves in a manner that can be every bit as vicious and self-serving as the force we inflict –and mis-inflict on those of other nations.
This second truth of 9/11 is wrapped around a reminder that we have not gotten over this, have not gotten over the need to lash out in retributive and even ethno-centric violence, have not yet shed the tears that actually promise some relief and closure, that allow us to move forward and release the better of our “terrifying” angels rather than those mostly ready to lash out in anger and revenge in response to the “shock” of circumstances we share in common with others more than we allow ourselves to realize.
The justifiable tears we have collectively shed during this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks have not, it would appear, made us see more clearly, feel better about ourselves, or risk more closeness with others. They have not cleared our hearts of malice, our lungs of toxins, or our brains of conspiracy. They have not made us rethink our role in the world as a superpower fading in too many aspects save for our technology and military hardware. They have not made us less sour in our affluence and entitlements, less suspicious of everything and everyone but ourselves, less confused about our role and responsibilities in the world, less able to own up to our mistakes as a nation as a way of rebuilding trust and becoming what we still have it within ourselves – somewhere, somehow – to become.
The legacy of 9/11 is in large part about the losses we’ve suffered, but perhaps more about the impacts of those losses we’ve ingested and then tolerated for too long, losses that much too often, we have then chosen to inflict on others. It is about what we have allowed an attack to do to ourselves, the spread of our self-justifying and reality-challenged views about our own people let alone about those in the world around us, views which continue to stunt our emotional growth, impair the pursuit of our ideals, widen our divides, keep us sighing and fretting at night rather than sleeping, and too often leave us feeling “cold and helpless.”
Much as we ask of individual clients in counselling, how long do we want the events of the past to maintain control of our current lives, to impede our zest for living and our capacity for closeness and care? This is a question for us all, one that holds the key to lives who can never forget, who will always need spaces for mourning and tears, but who can also refuse to renounce their responsibility to families and communities across this country and around this troubled world, including duties of solidarity towards those many millions who barely know a single day free from hunger, disease and “fingers trembling on the trigger” of guns that may well have originated in our own factories.
The two realms of 9/11 truth are not mutually-exclusive; we can honor them both if only we would.
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