9/11 looms

I got an email from the deacon who is working with us for a while in the Cluster about whether we'd planned anything for the four congregations on September 11--the 10th anniversary.

I hadn't because I'll be traveling that Sunday. And her question made me ponder some things.

First of all, I returned to that fateful day. Bern had gone out and I had watched the second plane hit the second tower on live TV, brushing my teeth, stunned, flabbergasted, almost unconscious with the impossibility of what I was watching.

The cognitive dissonance of it all had caused me to be unable to remember that both our children were in New York City at the moment I was watching on TV. Bern's truck screamed back into the driveway and she took the steps two at a time until she was beside me.

"The kids," she said, having heard about what was happened on her truck's radio, "We've got to reach the kids...."

Eventually we did. Our son was safe in Brooklyn but his girlfriend, Cathy, now our daughter-in-law had been on one of the last trains out of Brooklyn. She'd been taken off the subway and herded, along with hundreds other people, into Chinatown. Hours later, she walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, back to Josh.

Our daughter was beginning her first day of work at the American Ballet Company. She came up out of a subway close enough to the end of the island to see the first tower in flames. She, with thousands of others, walked back home in the midst of total confusion and chaos.

So, I have very personal connections to 9/11. I have a friend who lost 7 of the 11 guests she had at a dinner party a week or so before. One of my parishioners watched the people jump from the top of the towers and isn't over that experience yet. How could she be?

I've been trying to remember what we did at St. John's the Sunday after 9/11. I believe it was either a healing service or the Ash Wednesday Service. Either makes sense to me. Either we needed oil and hands upon us or to confess our sins. Not that our sins caused 9/11, not in any way: but because the enormous chasm between September 10, 2001 and September 12 made it impossible for us to continue to ignore our brokenness.

We were horribly broken on that day. Those young me who took over and flew those planes 'broke' us and shattered us totally. All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put us back together again after that lush September morning. (Odd, isn't it, that I remember what a perfect and lovely day September 11, 2001 was. Glorious in every way save one. And that one way made all the difference.)

Here's something I ponder, those terrorists who were striking against the 'Great Satan" of the United States, have, in remarkable ways, done enormous and possibly irreparable damage to us, much more than the loss of life and property of that day could have foretold.

First of all, they took away our innocence. No one alive that day remembered the last time an act of war had taken life on our soil. All the combatants in the Civil War were decades dead. The wars since then we've fought on someone else's soil. All the loss of life and hope we've endured was across some ocean or another. But 9/11 ensured that 'it can't happen here' would disappear forever from our vocabulary. Suddenly, in a matter of minutes, we realized we were part of the planet, not some idyllic oasis where truly bad things didn't happen.

They also took away our sense of safety. We've never been 'safe' in any real sense. Life is always out there ready to commit mayhem. But 'we thought we were' safe. For almost a decade now we've been living with a new-found anxiety, and, unlike most of the people on the planet, we're newcomers to that kind of fear and it has infected us at every level. We're more afraid of everything now than we were on 9/10/01--more afraid of strangers, aliens, emigrants, terror, people different from ourselves. We're more afraid of all those than we've been for a century or so. And we don't believe 'everything will be alright' any more. We doubt the Future in a way Americans haven't ever doubted what was coming. Being a young, naive nation, we always believed the 'future' would bring progress and hope and better days. We don't believe that anymore. 9/11 stole that from us.

9/11 also plunged us into to seemingly endless wars that have sapped our strength and killed our next generation and plundered our wealth. This is the ultimate assault that those terrorists made upon us. All our debt problems (and the debt problems of Europe to some extent since 'when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold') were planted on 9/11. Please remember, as few people seem able to, that Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus when he took office. A SURPLUS...how soon we forget. He would have frittered it away to some extent by tax breaks for the wealthy but if we hadn't been in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had to attack someone after 9/11, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis and debt problem that spawned the Tea Party and the absolute gridlock in Washington.

Without 9/11, I suggest, 'rational people' would still be directing the government and we would be, as a nation, investing in education, research and infra-structure rather than having almost bankrupted our nation in two unwin-able and seemingly unending wars that have cost us trillions of dollars while the gap between rich and poor has widened and the middle class has shrunk.

So those Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist, as I ponder it, have done what they meant to do almost 10 years ago. They have brought the Great Satan--the United States--to our knees.

That's really something to ponder and wonder about as the 10th anniversary approaches, looming ahead for a day I'll be driving from North Carolina back to New England.

Take a deep breath and ponder all that.