[This post also appears on the Philadelphia Weekly blog, Phily Now.]
Thirteen years ago today, almost to the minute, I was in the street when the first tower fell. You saw it fall on TV? You saw jack shit. Nothing you have ever seen, NOTHING, can prepare you for seeing with your own eyes the tallest structure in New York, the building you had ridden to the top of a dozen times and looked up to all of your life as an exemplar of human engineering come crashing down, floor by floor, with people trapped inside. We knew people were dying, and being so close to the collapse we all thought we were going to die too. I’ll never forget the sound of a woman’s voice. She was a woman of size, and in the mad crush of running people, she had fallen to the curb. She could not get herself up and was screaming, “Help me! Help me!” Several strong men came over and lifted her up, even as the chaos ensued around us. Most people ran.
I think many of those people are still running, but they don’t know it.
What happened later, after the incessant repetition of the towers’ collapse on TV, the national fear and terror stoked to a fever pitch, the president called for war on two fronts. And now, thirteen years later, a new president is calling for war again, this time on a so-called “limited” basis (we’ve heard that before) against a new enemy called ISIL, which is “worse than anything we’ve seen.” But what they really mean to say is “worse than anything we expected.”
Because we do the same thing again and again and again: we call for more war, believing it will bring about peace, and we are surprised when all it does it bring about more war.
Consider that it was we, the US, who destabilized Iraq. How many tens of thousands did we leave dead? And in that power vacuum a new force has arisen. The president plans to strike ISIL on a limited basis, but when have bombs ever led to a lasting political solution? We leave a country in tatters and we expect a few well-placed missiles to fix things? Two journalists are brutally murdered in a country most of us will never visit and could not point out on a map, and yet overwhelmingly (according to polls) people support military intervention against this new foe.
Meanwhile, after dozens of brutal gun murders committed here at home, many of them perpetrated by our children on other children, we can’t even pass sane gun laws. We’ve spent nearly a TRILLION dollars on the combined wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, and what has this accomplished? While here at home our public infrastructure languishes, bridges fail, and our economy has only begun to rise out of the greatest depression since 1929.
And yet the call to violence persists: attack them before they attack us.
We rush to punish a faceless force overseas and yet we have not punished a single person here at home for the economic collapse, even though the collapse can very easily be traced to distinct individuals whose actions destroyed countless lives here in the US. Many of these perpetrators still remain in their jobs.
I mourn today not only those who died thirteen years ago, but those who continue to die in our name, those nameless, faceless people whom we will never meet in a country we will never visit. Victims of our reactive fear and collective projection. We so easily see the flaws in other countries but never connect them with the flaws in our own collective psyche.
To bring about peace in the world and an end to violence does not begin with bombs (though I regretfully admit that they may sometimes be necessary), but with humanity. Do we stop to help the fallen get up, as those brave men did on 9/11 when they could just have easily fled with everyone else, or do we look for someone to punish for making us afraid? On this anniversary of that day I sincerely ask my friends here in the US and elsewhere if you want to continue this 21st century calling for more war, more violence, more bombs, or are you ready to try a different approach? You may call me naive or you might ask what such an alternative approach might be, and I would reply that the hawks have already won your mind, because the only solution you can think of is a military one. What else is there besides war? Use your fucking imagination.
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