9.20.01 11:58 am EST
Eve --
Finally had a chance to look at what you've posted on your website. Ordinarily I'd keep silent, in part because, as usual, both my reflexive and reflective reactions seem several degrees off-axis from what I'm hearing around me. But this is not an ordinary time, and for once I feel the need to put these thoughts down somewhere.
To begin with, I am pissed off. As you may know, I have spent the best part of my energy for the last several years trying in some small way to stave off precisely the kind of horror that has finally struck us at home. I would not claim for a second that anything I might have done would have averted this misery. But I have certainly seen how we go about trying to protect ourselves. You can fill in the blanks for yourself, in considering the possibility that it will have taken events of this magnitude to begin to shake off the layers of institutional torpor that have surrounded our collective efforts in this area for a long, long time.
I spent Monday working as a volunteer for the Red Cross in Manhattan. It didn't seem worth mentioning before, but some time ago I'd revived an old interest in amateur radio. Late last week the call went out for radio operators to assist in the Red Cross relief effort; so I raised my hand and got sent out right away, lugging bags of gear by train and subway into the city in the middle of the night.
You can imagine the general chaos.
I was dispatched to the new site where people would go to report and seek information on missing persons. It was not what I expected, based on the briefing, and on what we'd all seen on TV from the former site at the Armory. There were tables piled with food, walls of refrigerators with beverages, stuffed animals everywhere, row after row of curtained cubicles, a corps of Kinko's staffers with color copiers, escorted embassy dignitaries, and a steady torrent of people for twelve hours. There had to have been thousands passing through.
It was a beautiful day. There were round tables and chairs set up outside, near the Salvation Army trucks, which were the only sources of coffee. It all looked like an enormous outdoor cafe.
I must have recognized at least half a dozen people from having seen them days before on TV news. Everything about their demeanor -- the way they stood, talked, joked, sat, ate, smoked -- suggested that this had become their ordinary world. And everything was there to service their needs.
The phrase that keeps repeating itself to me is "the industrialization of grief." I don't mean that to be callous. It's simple amazement at the enormous and smoothly-operating machine that sprang into being to provide for an incomprehensible number of people, all of whom were reduced in the same instant to a state of utter uncertainty and disorientation.
Everybody is remarking on the unforeseen sense of solidarity and compassion that was suddenly evoked by the attacks. But the greater surprise may turn out to be the unexpected capacity for cooperation and coordination on a huge scale that was activated at the same moment.
I am disheartened by the rationality of the discussion over how we should respond. And this is where I'm afraid I am skewed from everybody else, on any side of the issue.
Even the urge for revenge is suffused with calculation. And those who are advancing caution are completely caught up in the intricacies of explaining the causes and effects, why it happened and what the consequences might be of every subtle variety of response.
Only Richard Reeves has articulated what I believe, which is that we are simply experiencing a continuation of a conflict that emerged a thousand years ago in the First Crusade. Why that should be so is a long conversation, and not to the point at present.
I won't claim the explanation is simple, but it is stark. A capacity for love and hatred reside equally in all of us. We carefully string out elaborate causal chains, or on the other hand contrive fervent theological justifications, to conceal from ourselves that, in the end, *none* of it is more than a pretext to finally and with a clear conscience give in to our urges to kill, maim, and destroy.
A few months ago I saw a TV show about the murder of a local cop in a small midwestern town. The cop's mother was talking about how her need for "closure" drove her insistence on execution for the murderer. All I could see was how her son's death had at last provided her with a clean excuse to submit to the rage that had always been simmering in her.
A couple of years ago I was in a car driving down a rural road in the Middle East. We passed a couple of kids -- four or five years old, probably -- in a little wood wagon. As we passed they played "mow down the Americans" with finger-Uzis.
What is critical for us as a culture and a society is that we proceed with this in mind. Much of the Islamic world hates us, not because of us, but because they do not want to be drawn into the level of consciousness that we represent, with its attendant uncertainty and anxiety. What the current situation demands of *us* is to take the next step in awareness which *we* face, and that entails acknowledging our own craving for destruction. And I believe it is only after taking that step that we will find any genuine path out of this morass.
Frank
1:55 pm
By the way, in reading over what I'd written, I see that I might be taken as advocating some kind of pacifistic course. That is not the case. I do believe we are obligated to defend ourselves, to reply and to ensure it doesn't happen again.
But what I am saying is that we must identify with both God *and* Satan, above all because it's true. A Manichaean view. Also strategically sound, since it encircles an adversary who can only take the one side, and sees us totally on the other. And it does remove the need to pin them down and say uncle and admit we're not bad guys, because we are, in a way that is indivisible from the angels.
Frank [Brickle]