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name: will baker blogrollin' other sites: |
coming around again
Tomorrow will be the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. The news shows are all running the obligatory human interest retrospectives, following up with family members of those who were killed, etc. Dick Cheney is emphasizing the Republican theme for the 2004 election season (�Re-Elect Bush or You Will Die!�) with his usual depth and gravitas. All the heads are talking. Is it wrong that I find it all so disgusting? Maybe I�m just uptight, but it seems to me that when people die, the appropriate response is mourning: we support one another while the wounds heal, we walk forward together, taking one step at a time. If we are Christians, we do our best to keep grief in perspective, knowing that death is not the end, for �even at the grave, we sing our song: Alleluia!� (Book of Common Prayer) In any event, we do our best to act like grown-ups. This view apparently puts me far outside the mainstream of American culture. Apparently I missed the meeting where we all decided that solely by virtue of being American citizens, we deserve a blanket exemption from the mortality and hardship that are the universal lot of a fallen humanity. In America, bad things only happen to bad people (gays and junkies get AIDS, Black people are poor, etc.)...the innocent among us (and remember that in America, �innocent� means merely average...we have never been overly fond of the truly good) deserve prosperous lives, large vehicles, old age, a substantial prescription drug benefit, and a peaceful death. And so it is that when millions perish in war and catastrophe abroad, we don our little cap of world-weary sophistication and sigh �such is the way of the world�. But when thousands of Americans perish in a tragically well-planned terrorist attack on our own ground, the world has changed forever, and there need be no end to mourning, no limit on shameless displays of angry self-pity, no agenda too ridiculous to be propped up atop of the graves of those now gone before us. There is no limit to our victimhood now. The world has changed forever. Elected officials no longer need tell the truth to their constituents. Any war is justified if it makes us feel better. Law enforcement need no longer be concerned about piddling luxuries like �privacy� and �rights�. Dissent need no longer be tolerated. Because, you see, the world has changed forever. That�s a phrase near the top of the list of pat and easy things people like to say about the attacks of 9/11/2001. It is definitely the most disturbing. What, exactly, does it mean? Violence, terrorism, and conflict are all terrible things. Horrible. And...inextricably part of the human condition. It is not for nothing that Christians describe the world as fallen. In fact, it precisely the eternal return of death and darkness, the universal prevalence of violence, and the fracture between good and evil that runs through every human heart that are meant by the doctrine of the Fall. The realism of this worldview stands against the idealism of every utopian scheme, and we who are children of the twentieth century ought to be reflexively wary of idealisms. We know that path leads to bloodshed. Radical Islam is a form of idealism, to be sure: a dream of the world purged of infidels. But it is not the only form of world-historical idealism infecting humanity with the dream of a pure world. American Protestantism has always struggled with this, from the days of the Puritans and their vision of a �city on a hill�. The ideal of American as the Kingdom of God has had countless secular resurrections over the past two centuries, the most recent (and possibly most terrifying) of which is George W. Bush�s stated intention to �rid the world of evil� by military force. The bald stupidity of such a statement tends to overshadow the more subtle idea, shared by more intelligent men in the current administration. Nothing could be more alien to the tradition of western Christianity than the notion that evil is discrete and separable from the good. The potential for evil is woven into the very fabric of the universe as a necessary consequence of the freedom that makes us human. To have the moral liberty to risk greatness, to found nations, to build towers, requires the possibility of other, darker choices. And so we protect what we value in the world as best we can. We stick together, and try our best to make choices that will be judged wise in the light of history. We struggle to resist evil and preserve what sustains human life. We do our best. And this is the world as we have it. And nothing has really changed. On September 11, 2001, something terrible happened. Something awful, painful, and totally unexpected. But this must be said: it was not something fundamentally new. It was a particularly brutal instance of what has been possible among humans since Cain struck down Abel. Another crack in a broken world. That Americans have come to understand these events as somehow fundamentally changing the world only confirms how far we have drifted into the sedative haze of media and markets. That we seem to believe that our hurt justifies anything we might want to do shows how truly we believe the gospel of pop psychology: we are not responsible, for we are victims. I don�t want to be misunderstood as minimizing the horror of that day in September. I never imagined I would live to see such a thing in America. My heart broke with everyone else�s. But tomorrow, I will not be making a big public spectacle of righteous grief. I will not be attending any memorial events. I will do what I did the evening of September 11, 2001: pray for the dead, as I always do...pray for peace, as I always do...pray for the nations and peoples of the world, as I always do. Because nothing is ever certain. And nothing ever was.
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