Happy Anniversary?
When I was a child, one of my favorite “sick day” activities
was to do “connect the dots” work books…not sure why. Creating images of animals, buildings or
objects out of a mass of numbered dots taught me how to count…but not much else
really. It was odd, though, how the mass
of dots on the page did not always reveal what might be hidden there once the herky-jerky lines connected them all. One
actually had to connect them in order for the image to come into focus.
As an adult, I suppose I still like to connect dots. And so here it is, September 11th. A connecting we will go.
15 years. Enough time
to pause and consider what happened, and how we have grown or changed.
Like most people of a certain age, the events of 9/11 divide
our lives…for me, if I manage to live to be 84, I will rather accurately be able
to divide my life into two halves….before and after terrorists awoke us from
the slumber that accompanies a sense of invulnerability.
There are many analyses and portraits of heroism and
humanity that accompany this date every year.
Rightly so, we honor first responders who risked or gave their lives. We honor the innocents slaughtered and those
they left behind. We laud praise upon
our leaders for extracting some meager measure of retribution. We proudly remind ourselves how it is we who
carried the day, and how we kept going forward, as if we had any choice.
But because we sometimes fail to connect all the dots, it
seems we do not spend enough time considering why it happened or if the act achieved
its goal. Oh sure, we can point to
cowardice and evil, and those factors were there to be sure. But such an undertaking had a purpose, and
those that hijacked planes were not joy riding….they, and their cohorts in al Qaeda
were looking to change us. To disrupt
our comfort…to make us behave differently, and perhaps even ignore our better
instincts that make us unique and exceptional.
The terrorists were hoping to derail our way of life, and to force us to
turn against the world, and perhaps even ourselves.
When The Bush/Cheney administration decided to lie to
congress, to the United Nations, and in fact to the American people about
weapons in Iraq….and when they decided to employ extreme methods of
interrogation, we began to become unrecognizable. We jailed people without charging, arraigning
or trying them. When we began to
re-embrace racism, to blame Muslims and immigrants for all of our problems, we
further distorted our appearance. And when
a faction of people nominated a hate filled man surrounded by other hate filled
people to be the Republican candidate for president, our features have become
downright ugly. The dot to dot image
became one we want to avert our eyes from.
The dots now aligned to reach from the vile hubris of one Dick Cheney to
the narcissism and contempt displayed by Donald Trump. It seems inevitable once you step back and
see how all the dots aligned, and I wonder if Bin Laden could have ever hoped
for such a perfect result.
Yes, we moved forward.
We licked our wounds, buried our dead, honored our heroes, and consoled
those left behind. We rebuilt, we
memorialized, we remembered, and we wept--because we were Americans, and that
is how we conduct ourselves.
But there
were some that shook their angry fists at the heavens, and they vowed to seek
vengeance, no matter the cost to our humanity.
They cast our better angels aside in pursuit of the devil who wrought
hell upon us, and we rallied behind them thinking that killing others would
make us feel better about those we lost.
They are wrong, and frankly, when one begins to connect
these dots, there appears an image of America that is troubling. No longer are we the beacon of light…now we
are the sword of vengeance. I have heard
it said, “America, right or wrong”….I think we need to think carefully about
what that oath really means.
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