9/11

When I first mentioned to my wife that I was thinking about dedicating a post to 9/11, she calmly gave me some very practical (and very telling) advice in the concise expression "be careful." The advice was practical because 9/11, as a subject of discussion, is especially liable to arouse the plethora of emotions that any audience is sure to have on the topic. This is very telling because it illuminates the disparity of perceptions that surround 9/11, and the controversial place which this event holds in our consciousness (the advice, too, was directed at me, acknowledging the tendency of my writing to be critical and ironical--not a good combination for a dedication to our generation's signal patriotic rallying point). But, seeing as how I've already begun…

Sometimes I think about the moment before the first plane hit, before chaos set in and everyone inside began to function on instinct, when heads were still clear--I think of that person, sitting next to the window, who glanced out and saw what must have been a surreal sight, so surreal that it couldn't have registered at first, but it couldn't be denied either. I imagine that person staring down the nose of an airline passenger jet, trying to speak but having lost the power of speech, trying to move but glued to their seat. I imagine them finally drawing a breath, and not having the time to consider that those were their last moments. I imagine the nose of the airplane as it first pierces the glass, then a bookcase or a desk, and finally coming in contact with this onlooker, who for a split second was face to face with a 350,000 pound Boeing 767 traveling over 500 hundred miles an hour. Part of me likes to imagine that they didn't flinch, that they met their fate without blinking. But this would require understanding, it would require comprehension--and there was nothing to comprehend, only something to react to. Had it been me, I would have turned to run, a futile gesture driven by the will to survive.

Fast forward to July 7 ,2007. The place is a bustling market in a northern Shiite village outside of Baghdad, Iraq. The person is a child, a little girl, standing next to her mother as she buys some fruit. She stares off into the crowds, glancing here and there at what catches her eye. I ask myself is she sees the truck, the explosive-laden truck that has pulled into the market, and idles for a brief moment before it combusts into a whole of fire, metal and light, carrying villagers away as if they were leaves in the wind. And I ask myself if that little girl and the onlooker who met their fate face to face in Tower 1 are not victims of the same tragedy, a continuing tragedy that is not confined to one event, but is perpetuated by a force that no amount of anti-terrorism task forces or border check-points or body scanners can ever truly extinguish. That force is the force of human convictions, of human beliefs. Terribly, terribly misguided beliefs--but no less powerful than their peaceful counterparts. It is belief that has sent every suicide bomber to their self-imploding demise, and belief that these beliefs must be stopped that has sent our young men and women to foreign lands to stand in their way. The continuing tragedy is the never ending war of beliefs, and the cost in human lives exacted by the evolution of ideals into violence.

That's the most frustrating part of 9/11, in my view: the actualization of beliefs that we cannot fight until they are actualized. We cannot arrest terrorists for thinking terrorist thoughts (I think); we must wait for the fine line they cross in taking a step towards action, which is deadly business, since sometimes that step is into a crowded marketplace with a bomb strapped to it. Before this point, sometimes all we have is the force and appeal of countering ideas, or at most the economic sanctioning power of whatever consensus we can muster. Unfortunately, the resilient insurgencies and terrorist groups who embody the face of these beliefs can be hard to starve out, and even harder to approach. Conversation, I would say, is at a minimum.

I've often pictured a roundtable discussion between myself, a translator, and a small group of al-Qaeda militants. The question that haunts me is what would I say? What would I say when they tell me that the West has collectively murdered tens of thousands of their citizens and exploited their countries? What would I say when they tell me that they do what they do because of America's support for Israel, or because the Koran has commissioned the Jihad they stand behind? That none of that was true? That the Americans who died on 9/11 were innocent? That they had misinterpreted the core writings of their faith? Even when I construct some argument that forces them to consider the inconsistencies of their beliefs and to justify the bloodshed of the little children who are too young to be infidels or Westerners or anything but children, I think about snapshots or videos I've seen of our own citizens screaming in each other's faces over the truth of their beliefs, of signs that say "God hates fags," of pictures of Barrack Obama with Hitler's mustache, and I feel the weight of the convictions that manifest themselves in these enraged expressions, and how they may become inexorably intertwined with the identities of those who hold them. And although most days the people behind these slogans go home and don't set up IEDs outside of their rivals' driveways, the passion in their beliefs is not so different from those in other parts of the world who use violent means in waging their ideological wars on the world.

Freedom of belief is a liberty we champion in this country, even though some would prefer either a little less or a little more on the public stage. And we have accepted that this freedom comes at the cost of discord within our own nation, and we pay that price on a regular basis. What we cannot accept, and must never accept--especially within our own borders, and by our own people--is the dark escalation of personal beliefs into violence-begetting hatred. For when we reach that point, when we commit terrorist acts on one-another, we stoop to a commonality with people whom we have sworn to defeat at all costs.

If America can learn anything from 9/11 besides a respect for the sheer power of conviction, it should learn to be an example to the world of a peaceful pluralistic society, which is a damn hard thing to be--and that tells me it's got to be worth something.

"The evolving consecration of Ground Zero has been tortuous and fraught, occasionally a flea-circus pantomime of the historical and global frictions that, directly or indirectly, rendered this patch of Manhattan eligible for consecration in the first place."

Nick Paumgarten, writing for The New Yorker.

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