Fifteen Years plus One Day

Heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning.

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.

-Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

On September 11, 2001, I didn't even know what "social media" actually was.  As far as I am aware, nobody did.  But I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon browsing through the reactions of the interweb to yet another 9-11 anniversary.  Some of you were "remembering the lost," some of you were "lamenting the response," others of you were still, unfortunately, indulging revenge fantasies and flexing metaphorical muscles.

After fifteen years, I'm still not sure I have a "good" response to what happened that day. I try to go back to that morning every so often to see if anything new has come up.  I remember it was beautiful (the weather I mean), it was a perfect September Day. I was in my second year at Pittsburgh Seminary,  I got up and went to class (Christian Education with Barry Jackson and Fred Smith).  The professors came in and said something like, "something is happening, you all need to go home and turn on your TVs." They didn't know the details, but they knew it was terrible. The class was supposed to start at 9:00, I was home by the time it should have started. I turned on the TV to the sight of black smoke pouring out of one of the World Trade Center Towers. No one knew what was going on, the news crews were talking about how it might have been accidental, with the cameras trained on the North Tower. Then, as I and just about everyone else who had managed to get near a TV watched that second plane came in to hit the South Tower.  Now it was damn sure no accident.  Then we started to hear about the grounding of flights and the Pentagon and flight 93 somewhere over western Pennsylvania.  That was the most panicky moment for me personally, that plane was in my neighborhood.  We drove right by the place where flight 93 crashed every time we traveled to and from New Jersey from Pittsburgh.

As things began to become known the scope of what happened sank in.  I just sat and watched.  After a while, I turned off the sound on the TV, made some phone calls, to my mom, I tried to get Michele on her cell phone, I left a message, mostly to try and warn her of what she was surely about to find out.  I got a few phone calls from other relatives who thought maybe 93 hit the Burgh. Then it was just down to the shock and sadness as the towers came down and the news footage flashed back and forth from New York to D.C. to that empty field in PA.  People covered in ashes, firefighters running into the cloud of smoke and debris.

I played my guitar a little bit.  I sat there in shock a lot.  I felt like there should be something to do.  There wasn't.

At some point the thought occurred to me: "This is going to start a war."

Actually it started several.  It has meant that my children have never known a world where we weren't fighting someone somewhere.  When they hear about 9-11, and they do hear about it, it is something that happened before they were born, it is something that has become entrenched as a reality as surely as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Before that day I wondered what my generation would call its defining moment.  My parents generation can all tell you "where they were" when they found out JFK was shot.  The generation before them had "the date that will live in infamy," WWII and all that went with it.

I suppose that, like those other moments and conflagrations, it's not useful to wish things had gone differently.  Sometimes things just need to break, because we just can't seem to keep our stuff on track.  I knew on 9-11 that thousands, if not millions were going to die as a result of that attack.  What's worse, I knew that the men who planned that travesty knew it as well.  Even before I really understood much about the mind of Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaida, I knew that this attack was a slap in the face, designed to provoke us into violence.

I don't mean to be dismissive about the tragedy, but the main goal of those attacks was not to defeat us or even frighten us, it was to provoke us.  They knew very well that the United States was not going to just shrivel up and die because of one attack.  They attacked our symbols: economic and military, in the heart of our two greatest cities.  What they did was symbolic and horrific enough that we couldn't just shrug it off.

There was no way in the world, even the most even-keeled politician could oppose a war of vengeance and justice.  The only voices that said anything about the fact that maybe violence was not the answer to this were the already marginalized and disregarded voices.  Everyone else, including me, was ready to get some payback. It really couldn't have gone any other way.

I guess the fact that we played into the plan of our enemies so truly to the script is what started to get me thinking; much too late and much too ineffectually, granted, but thinking nonetheless. It's a decade and a half now, and I know that if terrorists really want to get to us, they will.  I know that all the butt-kicking we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq has not really done much to advance the cause of peace on earth. I know we still have enemies, and probably have made some new ones along the way.

But I really don't believe it could have gone down any other way, which is always the way of violence.  It's like those fatalistic moments in the old westerns when the sheriff is buckling on his guns and going out to make a stand. He knows he's outnumbered and outgunned, he knows that even if he comes back alive there will always be more outlaws.  Whether he lives of dies, whether he wins or loses, nothing is really going to be solved for very long.  But he's gotta do, what he's gotta do.

It's not really a pleasant or hopeful feeling, being locked into a course you didn't and wouldn't choose, but I can't help feeling that we're still on that path.