• Tag Archives 9/11

  • Grief

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                    Full Harvest Moon

    Grief.  I’ve been asking myself, over this weekend, why we have had such an outsized response to 9/11.  Outsized, I say, when considered in the context of other, smaller countries who have as large or larger tragedies.  Outsized, I say, when it suggests we alone suffer.  Outsized, I say, when considered against lives lost in other conflicts like Vietnam, WWII, WWI, the Civil War.

    This morning it finally came to me.  Probably obvious to you already.  It is not an outsized response when the grief is for vulnerability, a new feeling of OMG, the dangers of the world might apply to us here at home.  Grief for a nation with two of the largest moats ever to defend a homeland:  the Atlantic and the Pacific.  Grief for a sense of a particular safety, a feeling that we could fight all of our wars far from our own shores.

    On 9/11 we entered the global village, became one with Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Russia.  Not one with them in scale of tragedy because their tragedies exceed our own, but one with them as fellow humans now fully exposed to the fracture lines of our too factional world.

    We gathered and mourned yesterday not for a particular event, though it was a tragedy, or at least not solely for a particular event, but for a new raw feeling, a wound not to the flesh, but to the heart.  Our hearts are now open, open to the pain and suffering experienced by those who have known all along that the world is not a safe place.

    May it make us less willing to inflict on the world yet more suffering.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on the news Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • A Black Harvest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

    On September 11, 2011 we will have a full Harvest Moon in the sky.

    What has been the harvest of the September 11th terrorist attack in New York City?  Is it one we want?  It is the one we have created.

    Shock and awe.  The neo-cons Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld’s favorite description for the blitzkrieg-like attack we promised the Iraqi government of Sadam Hussein.  More like a description of our response to 9/11.  We sat back, stunned, shocked by the devastation and awed by the daring of this sudden disruption to our national consciousness.

    It inflamed our imaginations, brought us together as a people, a people under attack by a faceless, but brutal enemy.  What to do?  Instead of letting the shock fade and the awe give way to a reality based understanding of what had happened we blundered into the most mistaken metaphor of my lifetime:  A War on Terror.

    Wars are fought by armies and air forces and navies.  In wars we blow things up, take people down, topple regimes and conquer nations.  We fight uniformed adversaries with our own uniformed champions, a sort of contemporary knight errantry hired to settle claims between or among rival powers.

    Only this wasn’t really a war.  It was a struggle more like an armed criminal investigation.  Their gang, Al Qaeda, against our gang.  Only we chose as our gang the US military instead of, say, the FBI or the CIA.

    We know this now, ten years on.  We’re gradually scaling back the ten years war, leaving the field to special forces, blends of military and intelligence operatives, working much like investigative agencies.  OK, really, really well-armed investigative agencies.

    In the meanwhile we have followed Paul Kennedy’s prescription in his Decline and Fall of Empires.  We have spread treasure and lives so freely across the Middle East and Central Asia that we have created a weakened economy, one vulnerable to severe shocks like the recent great recession and, possibly, yet a second recession.

    Not only have we weakened ourselves economically, we have impoverished once cherished civil rights through such draconian legal measures as the Patriot Act (Orwell, anyone?), extraordinary rendition and the prison at Guantanamo.

    We have also created a secret America that continues to expand at an increasing rate, its budgets hidden, its employees unknown and its mandates invisible.

    The fruits of this full Harvest moon come from poisoned fields:  people killed and injured, money missing by the pallet load, our own civil rights constricted and a Pentagon of occult agencies both outside and beyond our control.

    If we continue to gather in this crop, then, as George W. was fond of saying, the terrorists have won.

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Politics US History World History 📎and tagged

  • As the 10th Anniversary Comes

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    BJ came today.  She’s a New Yorker and has been since she attended Julliard many years ago.  Over lunch today Mark asked her about 9/11.

    She told her story and Schecky’s.  She was in New Jersey and saw the burning building across the grasslands.  At first she and her friends thought it was an accident.  Then the news became clear.  Schecky was at home at the Beacon Hotel, 74th and Broadway.  He’d been asleep, woke up, turned on the TV and thought the scenes he saw were a strange disaster movie.  As he clicked the channels, it was the same movie on all of them.  Relatives had left messages on his answering machine, “Are you ok?”  He thought, why wouldn’t I be?

    BJ, who had come to New Jersey by train, found a fellow musician with a car and the two of them spent seven hours trying to get her back to Manhattan, eventually driving far to the north to the Tappan Zee bridge and finding a back way into the Bronx.  Her friend lived in Brooklyn and BJ took a subway back.

    Over the next six months BJ said folks looked each other in the eyes on the streets and in the subways, trying to connect.  She rode a bike in Central Park, she had begun training for a race, and she said the atmosphere there was extraordinary.  Like the end of the world might be coming and folks needed to be out with other people.

    She spoke of playing music at St. Paul’s Chapel, where many of the rescue workers came for rest and food, part of a volunteer effort by the city’s musicians.  She was also angry that no monument was in place and that so little work had been done on the buildings that would replace the Twin Towers.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Memories US History 📎and tagged

  • That Mosque

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                          Full Artemis Moon

    Today the orchard, tomorrow…the vegetable patch and the orchard.  Kate and I will take up the carpet laid down for paths in the orchard (it keeps weeds down and mulch gets distributed over it), clean out the weeds that have infiltrated, lay the carpet back down and add any to spots that need it, preparing the whole for the wood chips delivered yesterday morning.  Tomorrow Kate will guide Ray, our lawn mowing Andover junior, while he covers the paths with wood chips.  Meanwhile I’ll mulch the areas in the vegetable garden that Kate and I cleared out over the last week.

    Over the weekend we’ll put the honey extractor together  and try it out in advance of our first full day of honey extraction on Monday.  This should be entertaining.  Mark has shrunk our Artemis label by a third and modified the glasses based on his realization last Monday that the specs he’d designed didn’t quite match mine.  I already have the PDF from him with the new design and smaller labels.  He’s a pro.

    OK.  I understand that some people on the right believe the mosque near the old World Trade Center is offensive.  They feel it pokes a finger in the eye of the whole country and especially those who lost relatives on 9/11.  Their line is, “Just because you have the right, doesn’t make it right.”  True enough.  Doesn’t make it wrong, either.  So the question comes to down message.  What message will a mosque near the ground zero send?

    Will it communicate rank insensitivity and disregard for injured feelings?  Will it intentionally stir the pot of an already angry public?  Or.  Will it communicate, as I said before, that we know the difference between terrorists who use Islam as an ideological justification and those for whom Islam is a religion of moderation and peace?  Will it show that our First Amendment freedoms, those that developed in light of religious persecution in Europe, persecutions that, ironically, sent the first settlers to Massachusetts, apply today as they have for over 200 years?  I know which message I want to send.

    Now, having said that, is there a way to ameliorate the inflamed feelings of those who have been led to see this as a provocation, an insult?  I don’t know, but I would hope there is.  Next year will see the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster, so some concern probably focuses on this upcoming date.  I wish there was a way to sit down and discuss this, acknowledging the feelings of betrayal, anger, incredulity, fear, grief, sharing our mutual dismay at the act and the struggle with the terrorists since then, while allowing the Muslims for whom this was an equal disaster and one compounded by rejection and xenophobic reactions to open up their feelings.

    Or, is the gulf between the right and the left so vast that there is no bridge?  Are we so far apart in our partisan camps that dialogue is no longer possible?  If it’s true, and there are times over the last decade when I’ve felt it was, then our country will have succumbed to the terrorists after all because, as Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

    I’m not trying to get to a kum by ya moment here.  I would relish, though, genuine conversation between citizens of differing views.  How can it happen?

    Here’s an excerpt from a CBS report that gets to where I’d like to go:

    Society|Thu, Aug. 26 2010 07:59 AM EDT
    Some 9/11 Families Show Support for Mosque Near Ground Zero
    By Nathan Black|Christian Post Reporter

    A group of religious and civil rights groups and family members of 9/11 victims announced on Wednesday the formation of a new coalition in support of an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.

    Calling themselves the New York Neighbors for American Values, the coalition stood near City Hall in lower Manhattan defending religious freedom and diversity.

    “We share the pain … and yes, even the lingering fear caused by the September 11 attacks. But we unequivocally reject the political posturing, the fear mongering and the crude stereotyping that seek to demonize the project whose goal is to build bridges among the faiths,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

    “We are committed to resisting the efforts to push Park51 out of downtown and we reject the refrain of ‘freedom of religion but not in my backyard,'” she added.

    Talat Hamdani lost a 23-year-old son, a paramedic, in the 2001 terrorist attacks. But she said supporting the Islamic center and mosque “has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with standing up for our human rights, including freedom of religion,” as reported by The Associated Press.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Humanities Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • Build the Mosque

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

    On mosques and sites and sealing wax.

    Are we fighting with Islam or with terrorists who use Islam as a cover?  You know the answer.  What message do you give to the ummah, the worldwide Islamic community, if you deny a mosque near a site where the terrorists who use Islam as a cover delivered a powerful blow?  That you don’t know the difference.

    Or.  What message do you give if you allow the mosque?  That you know the difference.  Which strategy has better long term potential both within the US and outside it.  Again, you know the answer.

    When demagogues pander to the lowest common denominator on volatile matters like this, it corresponds to yelling fire in a crowded theatre.  This is intentional inflammation of an issue not because you believe the matter is substantive, but because you know it will rouse the sleeping dogs.

    There is, in fact, no issue here.  Let me say again.  No issue.  The first amendment, even earlier than the holy and blessed 2nd, protects freedom of religion and freedom of association and freedom of speech.  Which of these constitutional, black letter law freedoms do you wish to ignore?  Where’s a strict constructionist when we need one?

    Let them build.  Let them demonstrate that the United States can discriminate between friend and foe.  Let them demonstrate that the constitutional protections that make us a desirable place for immigrants from around the globe are still in place.

    Let us demonstrate that the coward and the bully will not, should not win this kind of rhetorical battle.

    Let them build.

    Here’s the contrary argument from the New York Daily News:

    “…But what about common sense and decency? If Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf had either, he and his group would reconsider the location out of respect for the hordes of Americans, many of them 9/11 family members themselves, who think that this idea just plain stinks. And if it weren’t for political correctness and our decidedly 21st century paranoia over offending Islam, our national leaders would proudly echo those sentiments.

    Enough is enough. The speechifying and pontificating on the mosque’s constitutionality are a distraction and a straw man. No one in serious circles who opposes the mosque at Ground Zero is suggesting it should be made illegal to build a Muslim house of worship near the site of the 9/11 attacks.

    What they’re trying to say, and largely to plugged ears on the left, is that having the right doesn’t make it right.”


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