Living in the shadow of a 9-11 that's been co-opted

Today is the fifth anniversary of 9-11.

At its simplest, this is the anniversary of the date that terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, intended for the U.S. Capitol, crashed near Shanksville, Pa., when the passengers on board rose up and tried to seize control of the plane. It is a date that affected America as profoundly as Dec. 7, 1941, did.

I was asleep when the towers fell, after a late night at the newspaper where I was a copy editor. It wasn't until almost 11 o'clock that I learned from a neighbor what had happened. At the time, stories were flying faster than facts, and my neighbor told me that there were still at least four planes airborne, and the Air Force had been ordered to shoot them down.

Some people say the earth moved for them. For me, it was as though the world had vanished, and I was plummeting into the void with everything and everyone around me. I remember sitting with my wife as we tried to digest what was happening. My older brother flew regularly for his job. Was he traveling, or was he safe at home? A friend of ours worked in the New York financial district. Was he alive?

Even learning that they were both accounted for wasn't enough to pull me out of free fall. I was still in a daze when I went to work that afternoon and plunged deeper into the chaos.

Our own television set had stopped receiving signals. At the news room, the television in the corner kept flashing the same nightmare in a repeating loop, as jet planes crashed into the World Trade Center time and time again.

Every time I checked the Associated Press wire, there were more updates, minute-by-minute reactions from around New York and the world, details of what had happened, and lists of the dead.

I cried like a baby. I felt the fear of passengers on the hijacked flights, heard the screams and tasted the despair and terror of people I had never met. I asked myself over and over again what kind of a world we had brought our daughter into.

Five years later, I remember that horror freshly, but I don’t know what I am supposed to feel anymore. 9-11 has become so politically charged that it no longer belongs to us, let alone to bereaved families. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some of the pundits used it to blast U.S. foreign policy, trade and hegemony. Since then, it's been invoked as a cover for warrantless spying on Americans, the war in Iraq, and increased suspicion of Arabs and Muslims.

And of course, 9-11 has been invoked to call people traitors and cowards for challenging the Bush administration's policies, and it has been invoked to accuse Bush of dishonoring the memory of its victims.

The terror attack on 9-11 have fundamentally altered the way we view ourselves and one another. It has become the defining event of the Bush presidency. It has intensified the emotion and the rhetoric surrounding immigration, and it has radicalized the political voices in our nation.

Some of those killed were heroes by occupation. The firefighters and Port Authority officers  rushed into darkness and danger to save others, not knowing if they would return. Others, like the passengers on Flight 93, became heroes when circumstance drove them to take the offensive against their attackers.

But I want the dead to be able to rest in peace rather than being dragged around as an excuse for someone’s current pet political project. I want the families to be able to carry on with their lives without constantly being seeped in misery.

A week ago, we barely thought of 9-11, and a week from today we will think about something else again..But for the space of this 24 hours, the United States and the rest of the world has what it needs to occupy its attention so that it is not forced to deal with its own existential meaningless. We do not have to grapple with our empty pursuit of success, with our obsession with entertainment and technology, with our lack of foundation as individuals and as a culture.

Instead, we can unite in a shared grief, and mourn the dead – both for what they lost and for what we have not yet gained.

In the meantime don’t know what to tell my children. I just want them to have something in life that they value. I want them find something worth believing in, something they themselves have chosen and committed to.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Praying for peace, not for victory

I'm not praying for our troops.

That's not exactly true. I am praying for our troops, just as I'm praying for Iraq, and for the members of the insurgency there. I'm not praying for coalition troops to visit a crushing defeat on the heads of their enemies, and I'm not praying that President Bush will bring our troops home tomorrow, nor that he'll announce a timetable for a withdrawal from Iraq.

And I'm certainly not praying that the quagmire we've turned Iraq into will continue as it has been, sucking in more lives every day as neighbor turns upon neighbor and the holiest, most sacred and most mundane duties become life-endangering.

What am I praying for then? If you rule out a decisive victory, a sudden or gradual withdrawal, and the perpetuation of the mess we've made of Iraq, what is there left to pray for?

I've realized something over the last few days: War is outside the nature of Christ. Completely outside. Not just this abominable mess where people are raping young women and destroying families to cover it up, where suicide bombers are blowing up religious services, where one person cuts off another one's head and calls it a righteous act, but war itself -- where one member of the family of Man fires a weapon at another member in hopes of ending his life -- is a horrible abrogation of what God intended his creation to be. It is outside the nature of Christ. It is not what God desires for his creation.

The prophets, looking ahead to the Kingdom of God, saw a time when the nations would lay down their swords and shields, when we would beat our weapons into plowshares and study war no more. They saw it coming from far off, and they rejoiced to see it, if only at a distance. I realized today that I've been doing the same thing, waiting for a pie-in-the-sky time when the poor would receive the Kingdom of Heaven, when the meek would inherit the earth, and when peace would come.

There's no need to wait. The Kingdom is here. It's now. It's arrived.

Speaking to the stunned congregants of his hometown, Jesus declared, "'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

"Today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence."

If we believe that the Kingdom of God is incarnated in the person of Jesus, and if we also believe that Christ is in us and we are become the Body of Christ, then there is no need for there to be war, poverty, hunger, or other such afflictions among us. They are there because we allow them to be, because we accept that they are a part of life, and because we have failed to engage the world around us and address the root causes of these problems.

Peace — note that I did not say appeasement — is not easy. It is far harder to maintain the peace than it is to go to war. Peace requires understanding your foe, meeting his needs and making sacrifices yourself, something we are woefully unprepared or unwilling to do.

Peace, not war, is God's dream for the Middle East, just as it is his dream for every tribe, nation and language.

I'm not praying for victory in Iraq. I'm praying for peace.




Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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In the shadow of 9-11, who is our enemy?

Muslims are not our enemy.

In the days after 9-11, President Bush reminded the country of this important truth, and its bears repeating. Muslims are not our enemy. There are millions of Americans who profess the Muslim faith, and beyond our borders are millions upon millions more appalled by the 9-11 terror attack.

But as Muslims are not our enemy, we owe it to ourselves and to them to ask who or what our enemy really is.

Is the enemy just Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda terrorist network, and other organizations allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 and subsequent terrorist attacks?

Is the enemy fundamentalism? If so, does that apply to other "flavors" of fundamentalism, including Hindu fundamentalism and Chistian fundamentalism?

Is the enemy extremism in general?

What is the spiritual component to what we have been seeing before and after the attacks? What should we be praying for?

Some people are saying that we brought the attacks on ourselves because of our political or economic policies. They fault us for backing Israel despite its troubled relationship with the Palestinians that has led to a yearlong intifadah, and in propping up corrupt foreign governments because of their benefits to us in terms of trade or political leverage, even in the face of horrendous human rights.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went as far as blaming homosexuals and abortionists. What should we as a church be repenting of?

I can't speak for anyone else, but as a Christian myself I find it troubling to hear people wishing Osama bin Laden the most exquisite deaths imaginable and gloating over the probable soteriological sceniarios now being played out by the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. My wife and I pray daily for the people in Afghanistan and for the Taliban, for their repentance and for revival in that nation.

Who is our enemy? The answer we settle on will have profound implications for us as a people and for our nation.


Copyright © 2001 by David Learn. Used with permission.