Moving Targets

September 11, 2015
It was the same kind of beautiful September day, blue sky, the barest hint of a cool down coming.  I sat down to coffee and Sportscenter, the same way I did fourteen years ago.  Then I had a class to go to, today is a day off.  Then there were no patriotic stories about how baseball brought us back from a tragedy, because as of yet there had been no tragedy.  I watched a little mini-documentary about President George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch of game 3 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and I remember the backdrop all too well.  The piles of rubble that still smoldered downtown, the walls of pictures of the missing and the dead.  The shock and the grief.  In addition to the usual birthdays, anniversaries and holidays I am growing a collection of horrible, tragic days that I remember every year: personal/family, July 23rd, communal, pretty much the entire first week of June, and national, September 11.
On my walk this morning I saw a jet streaking it's vapor trail across a blue sky, and I started having thoughts, but I'll be honest, I really didn't come up with anything new.  I've been down this road and also this road before.  So I'm going to reach for something a little more hopeful.
I remembered a moment when I was actually proud of George W. Bush.  It was the baseball thing that jogged my memory, but it was how he responded in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.  You had to be paying attention because the warmongers got on the scene awfully fast, but there was a moment where he didn't jump right on the revenge train.  It was before the "mission accomplished" fiasco, before the axis of evil, before we went shambling off to war.  He seemed like a pretty regular person who was just trying to do his best with a bad situation.  I remember a moment when even the President of these United States was humble and thoughtful and had no other choice than to lean into grace and hope.
Too bad it didn't last longer.
I can't help feeling like Al Quaida and the warmongers have pushed us to a point where we have stopped seeing each other as human beings.  Every once in a while (actually more often than you might think), as a fan of non-violence, I stub my toe on someone for whom non-violence is akin to a belief in unicorns, it's a nice idea but probably has no place in the real world.  My belief that the world would be a safer and better place if we had not gone all Rambo/Chuck Norris across the middle east seems to them to be dangerously naive, and perhaps it is, but to tell you the truth I think I'm pretty safe in believing it, because no one is ever going to actually test it out by foregoing the all too natural urge to vengeance.
As an interesting note, on the occasions when I have had these conversations with actual soldiers and/or veterans, I actually found more common ground and assumptions than I do with your garden variety armchair general.  I'm just going to chalk that up to a sort of silent testimony to being right.
But here's where I have to confess to being a bit un-fair.  Somewhere in the seven years after 9-11 I forgot that W was actually not that bad of a guy, I lost sight of his humanity because I don't agree with so much of what he did.  I've been on the other end of that stick, and I don't particularly care for it.  Not that POTUS was actually losing sleep over what some small town pastor thought about him playing Sheriff of the Globe, but nonetheless I stand convicted of being the sort of idealogue I often criticize.
I think this is why genuinely thoughtful, and committed Christians are so often thought of as wishy-washy, because we have realized that being right is probably not even half the battle.
It's getting a little annoying to tell you the truth, every time I get a good case of righteous indignation going about something or someone, anytime I creep near to righteous and justified hatred, God likes to  remind me: "Yep, they're my children too."
Well, I guess if I have to lay off W, there's always Cheney...
What him too?
Poop.