Remembering 9/11 ... and other thoughts
Originally published in the Aug. 25, 2005 edition of the Siloam Springs Herald-Leader
A few loosely connected thoughts, as recorded in the glow of a citronella candle and the midnight’s full moon …
**
Four years ago this week, I was enjoying an exhilarating ride as a novice campaign coordinator for a congressional race.
And four years ago this week, most of the college students I am preparing to teach this semester were something like 10th-graders.
I remember the news at the time was dominated by shark attacks, a missing (later found murdered) Capitol Hill intern, Colin Powell’s emergence as a serious player in the new Bush administration, the appointment of John Danforth as special envoy to the Sudan, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble.
A couple of weeks later, all of that was forgotten when the towers fell.
An interval of four years is significant when you’re a student or a professional academic. It’s essentially the length of a generation, maturing from awkward freshman to heady, confident senior. It’s longer than the time America spent fighting on the battlefields of World War II. It’s only a few months shorter than was our Civil War.
And it’s practically an eternity for a college student who is truly awakening to the larger world. In a couple of weeks, I will take the opportunity with my students to go back four years, and consider again what America suffered on one terrible, endless day.
For me, the memories are as clear as the searing moment I turned on the TV with my bowl of cereal that Tuesday morning.
For them, I wonder if the memories are more like something out of a previous life.
**
The news item that captured my attention this week was the agonizing Israeli “pull-out” from Gaza. Pulling out is something armies do. What happened this week was the forced removal of a decent, civilized people from their homes.
Jews have endured this before, but they are certainly not the only ones. Just ask our Cherokee neighbors across the state line. A couple of centuries ago, their native homeland was western Georgia.
I can’t really fault the Sharon government for coming to this difficult decision. The practical reality of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is that all solutions will result in someone’s heartbreak. The conflict is quite simply a problem of irreconcilable racism.
Ethnic Palestinians live quite happily throughout the nation of Israel. Why is it impossible to ask the Palestinians to allow decent Jews to live within their territories, unmolested and at peace?
I was struck by the sincere gentleness of much of the televised imagery from the forced evacuation of the Jewish settlements in Gaza. In one synagogue where settlers and supporters staged a scene of civil disobedience (the most ardent demonstrators did eventually turn violent as they tried to defend their rooftop keep), an Israeli camera feed inside the synagogue provided American news networks with a touching scene.
One wing of the house of worship held a number of women and children, refusing to leave and forcing Israeli soldiers to physically carry them out, one by one, four soldiers per settler.
Deliberately, only female troops seemed to be carrying the women out. In one striking case, four uniformed women, soldier’s helmets on their heads, worked to get a handle on a protesting mother. The woman was lying on the floor of the synagogue, a child sitting astride her body. As the handful of female soldiers lifted her to be carried out, another soldier’s hands could be seen reaching in, carefully holding back the hard helmets of the female troops from hitting the child as they struggled to lift her mother.
It was a moving display of the gentleness of a civilized people, carrying out painful orders as humanely as they could.
In other scenes, settlers were escorted out of their homes, not by the rough tactics of riot police, but with uniformed soldiers’ arms lovingly wrapped around their shoulders in support.
One distraught man, perched on the corner of his ill-fated home’s roof, was patiently urged to come back in through an upper window by a handful of soldiers. When he finally relented, he was pulled back into the house with an embrace born of genuine sympathy.
This is how a civilized people faces hopelessnes: not with suicide bombs and wanton murder, but with love.
**
In some of my discussions lately, I’ve come across quite a number of references to that crude old line, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
The bald moral equivalency of this cliché is a poison to reasoned thought.
True, one man may view a violent killer as a terrorist; another may view him as a freedom fighter. But that does not mean both have an equal claim to their view being correct.
I may view the moon as a piece of swiss cheese; another may view it as whole world of ice and rock. The mere fact that both of us hold our views strongly says nothing about the truth of those views.
The butchers, beheaders and car bombers of the present day are certainly hailed as freedom fighters by some, including ignorant bedouins, relativist ministers of parliament and willfully blind propagandists with a movie camera and spooky background score.
But these “freedom fighters” are neither fighters in the classic military sense nor lovers of freedom – at least, not the personal freedom of the people they claim to represent. Nor, as “freedom fighters,” are they attacking anything resembling oppression.
Relativist thought, however, is all too easy to embrace, since it absolves one of the heavy responsibility of conviction. A pity relativism is so popular in the halls of academia.
If anything, institutions of learning are places where we should be seeking the objective truth of all things, as far as it can be known. This new, frightening world is confusing enough as it is, without insisting that moral confusion is the only valid perspective.
posted by PaulTiberius at 10:10 PM
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