|
 
| |
To Rose Harmony or
Brave New World:
The Deeper Challenge of 9-11
Prologue—
Called to a "New Birth of Freedom"
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here … to the great task remaining before us … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ~ that this [world], under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom…
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg
Address
(with one word amended)
The Consecration
Of “Ground Zero”
That morning is indelibly inscribed in our
consciousness. Terrified people jumping out of 85th floor windows to
escape the inferno within. Men running up the stairs, into that
inferno—when everyone else was running down—and paying for their courage
with their lives. Thousands instantly cremated by the fires or buried in the
collapsing buildings. The determined courage and last words of love of the
Flight 93 passengers before its fiery crash in the
Pennsylvania
woods.
For all of us, these events were embedded in
heart-wrenching turmoil, both outer and inner: coping with the terrifying
images, shown ever and again in print and on television, of the plane’s
attack, the towers engulfed in flames and their subsequent implosion;
accompanying the frantic search for survivors; digesting one’s own images of
those final minutes on the four aircraft. And grappling with the many questions
the tragedy raised: Why? Why? Why? Bin Laden, the Taliban, “bombing
Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age,” the further terror attacks ahead, how to regain
“security;” and coping with the pervasive fear, anger, hatred.
Amid this turmoil of the first weeks, I
visited
Gettysburg
with a friend, the bloody battlefield in a war between fellow-countrymen that
had claimed even more thousands of lives than September 11th. I
sensed that its landscape, together with Abraham Lincoln’s Address, might
offer clues to the deeper significance of our own tragedy.
In the evening of our visit, as the sun was
setting, we walked the battlefield. We tried to recreate for ourselves the
gathering of the armies, the battle lines, the disastrous Confederate charge on
the final day (
Friday, July 3, 1863
), the terrifying sound and smell of unrelenting cannon fire, the bloody
hand-to-hand combat, the gruesome death toll; and the evening after the battle,
rent by thunder, lightning and torrential rains.
Before heading for bed, I turned to Lincoln,
who had traveled there some months later for the dedication of the cemetery for
the fallen soldiers. His two-minute address—to a nation rent in two by Civil
War—was totally silent about the issues being fought over. It didn’t mention
sides, enemies or battle lines. Yet those 272 powerful words, committed to
memory by countless American students, had the power to radically transform and
redeem that bloody tragedy. They transformed the Constitution—and with it, the
country itself—by resurrecting the document’s spirit of freedom out of its
letter of countenanced slavery. As Garry Wills
writes (in his Pulitzer
Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg:
The
Words that Remade America):
Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself…. He would cleanse the
constitution—not … by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit…. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological baggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future
indefinitely.
Before sunrise the following morning, I
returned to the (now deserted) battlefield. A gentle layer of mist blanketed the
fields. I stood there a long time, listening to the quiet, peaceful mood of the
rising sun and the slowly dissipating mist, trying to place myself into the
morning after the battle, the turmoil abated, the ground consecrated by the
blood of those thousands of human souls.
Turning my thoughts, then, to the 11th,
I realized that the image so deeply engraved in our consciousness—the
thundering avalanche of steel, concrete and dust—is not fully truthful. To
imbue it with truth, we must see, finely infusing that seemingly bone-dry
torrent, a holy, consecrating mist of human blood, together with the ashes of
those “instantly-cremated” souls, ashes that, though scattered without due
reverence, had nevertheless hallowed the ground where they’d been spread.
And I spoke aloud, into the mist,
Lincoln
’s words of dedication.
These three moods stayed with me as we
journeyed north: the tumult of the Friday battle, with its horror, suffering and
consecrating bloodshed; the peaceful mist covering the battlefield the following
morning, with the colors woven into it by the rising sun; and the resurrection
mood of
Lincoln
’s address. And two days later, again at sunrise, I stood at the burial ground
of our thousands of souls,
Lincoln
’s words still ringing in my ears.
I spoke them again, out loud:
We cannot dedicate ~ we cannot consecrate ~ we cannot hallow ~ this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here … to the great task remaining before us ~ that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion ~ that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain.
Questions pressed in on me: What is our great,
remaining task? If the human sacrifice that has consecrated our
“battlefield” is not to be in vain, if we, too, are to transform this
tragedy into something truly fruitful for humanity, aren’t we challenged
to take a consciousness stride as great as
Lincoln
’s? To “revolutionize the Revolution and give ourselves a new past to
live with that will change our future indefinitely”? To rededicate
ourselves to an unfulfilled task, to a further “new birth of
freedom”—not only as Americans, but as citizens of an increasingly
single world?
Eliminating Terrorism—
Band-Aid, Radical Surgery, Real Healing
During the following weeks,
these germinal experiences from the battlefield began to shed new light on the
tragedy. At the same time, the questions pressed in more forcefully and clearly.
Our American “birth of
freedom,” I realized, has not been a one-time achievement. It has taken place,
rather, in successive phases of volcanic upheaval, each with its immense
achievements and tragic failures.
Washington
’s victory was but the first of these. For, although successful in freeing the
nation from foreign government, it left intact the institution of slavery, over
which the nation was torn apart less than a century later. And even
Lincoln
’s courageous signing of the Emancipation Proclamation left the majority of
the black population lacking basic human rights and living with poverty, hunger,
illiteracy, poor education and minimal health care. Hence the Civil Rights
battles of the ‘60s. Yet again, despite that era’s many victories, countless
of our brethren of color still face the kind of suffering Martin Luther King was
fighting, but now amplified by the terrible scourge of drugs.
September 11th struck a nation
that is on this unfulfilled journey towards true freedom. And we have yet to
uncover the deeper “layers” of response this event calls for. Our military
action in
Afghanistan
was, at best, but the outermost layer. Whatever our views of this campaign, it
is clearly, in the longer term, only a band-aid, a layer of surface protection
from the activity of a particular terrorist group. To battle terrorism itself
will require far more radical surgery, a far deeper layer of response. As the Wall
Street Journal acknowledged, we will have to address the pollution of the
soil in which terrorism festers:
… any
longer-term war on terrorism has to deal with the rampant poverty, lack of
education and inadequate health care around the globe.[i]
These are the same basic
rights that were the focus of the Civil Rights movement, but confronting us now
on a global scale. And we know only too well how deep, cruel and systemic such
dysfunctions are and how radical is the needed surgery—those upheavals left
many of our cities in flames. What a daunting challenge! One that will need, in
the Journal’s words, a new, global Marshall Plan.
After the military campaign in
Afghanistan
, it became clear that, if we use the band-aid and don’t administer the
surgery, the band-aid will eventually break open to reveal a far more seriously
festered wound. “We may win the war and lose the peace” went the oft-quoted
expression. Yet even if we manage to perform this major surgery, it alone will
not be enough to promote real healing of terrorism itself, down to its
roots. It can only put the illness into remission for a time. What’s still
called for—on both sides of the terrorist divide—is to uncover yet another
layer, to take up the radically fundamental challenge that King posed in his
last Sunday sermon:
Through our scientific and technological
genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood. And yet, we have not had the
ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood…. We must all learn to live
together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied
together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality.[ii]
It’s immensely difficult for us to even imagine
such a truly brotherly society, a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-cultural
society. One where members of the different races, cultures and religions not
only tolerate, but also understand and appreciate, each other. Yet, to fully
confront September 11th, we will not only have to imagine King’s
challenge. We will have to realize it. For this challenge underlies even the
steps the Journal calls for. Power unenlightened by brotherhood always
tends to act “unecologically,” blind to its broader context. Spreading
democracy or mitigating poverty without “getting inside” the experience of
those being “helped” always has a particular flavor: that of dropping token
yellow packages of medicine and peanut butter with English instructions for
starving, illiterate Afghans.
This Stage of Freedom
Depends Entirely on the Individual
Brotherhood, in King’s sense, may not seem
a matter of freedom—which we usually regard as independence from outer
constraints. But true freedom also requires consciousness, wakefulness. And
King’s challenge calls on us to develop new capacities of individual
wakefulness—hence the title of that last sermon: Remaining Awake through a
Great Revolution.
In differing ways, this challenge for
wakeful insight has accompanied each of the volcanic upheavals in our developing
freedom. What form would our initial freedom have taken, we could ask, if the
Revolutionary War had not been accompanied by the light of the vision formulated
in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or the Federalist Papers?
Or the later freedom phases without Lincoln’s and King’s vision for a more
human future?
In each case, this vision was based on
insight into the deeper human striving of the time—for democracy in 1776, for
human dignity of all races in 1863, for a society that recognizes basic
political and economic rights in 1963. Each of these battles for freedom,
however, challenged the individual successively more deeply. The nation’s
founding ideals required from the individual only a general recognition
of human equality. Through the battles around slavery, the individual was
challenged to see beyond skin color and develop tolerance towards people with a
radically different cultural background. And a truly brotherly society
challenges our individual consciousness even more deeply: not only to tolerate
our neighbors of other colors, cultures and religions, but to develop the deeper
light of understanding that allows us to truly see them—and appreciate
them—as individual human beings, as our sisters and brothers.
The challenge confronts each of us fully within our individual consciousness.
For only within that consciousness can we make another human being our sister or
brother. And we can never be forced to do so—it can only happen through our
own persevering, strenuous work. Through inner battles, which are always the
most challenging ones. Through radically transforming our own
consciousness.
In the process, we will find that our scope
for practicing brotherhood is far more encompassing than it initially seems. It
certainly includes learning to understand our neighbors, including those on the
other side of the globe; and learning to live in harmony with them. But it has
far broader dimensions: learning to live in harmony with the natural world; and
with the universe. Even for King
, certainly no hippie, freedom, justice and brotherhood are not merely human
conventions, but are rooted in the nature of the cosmos:
We are witnessing
in our day the birth of a new age, with a new structure of freedom and
justice.... Now the fact that this new age is emerging reveals something basic
about the universe. It tells us something about the core and heartbeat of the
cosmos.
For many people today, the view that
freedom, justice and brotherhood sound out of the “heartbeat of the cosmos”
strikes a resounding chord, also in relation to the natural environment. Social
activism, environmental activism and attaining a consciousness that allows us to
become attuned to this heartbeat then become three sides of the same striving.
Since this striving often looks to King’s
(and Gandhi’s) non-violent methods, the question then becomes: what faculties do we need to develop, that can provide the foundations
for a non-violent, sisterly relation to others, so we can hear and understand
them as a living, human individuals, so our actions can harmonize with them,
rather than violate them? Likewise in our relation to humanity as a whole,
to nature and the universe. In the natural domain, we call this approach
ecological, a term we can also apply in this broader context. King very
consciously developed an “ecological” world-view of this kind, one that
enabled him to hear and act in harmony with the deeper realities and
requirements of his time.
Just as the band-aid will be
counterproductive without the radical surgery, so will the latter be without the
real healing provided by a true brotherhood, rooted in the ability to hear what
resounds from the “heartbeat of the cosmos.” As we undertake this
individually challenging journey, this deeper undercurrent of King’s
life—rooted in his “ecological” world-view—will, ever and again, be a
beacon for us; so fundamental to who he was, it infused everything he
spoke, taught and did. In addition, we’ll be guided by Rachel Carson as we
turn to nature, and by Oliver Sacks with the individual. It was also through
Sacks that I found the essential tool— the story—that we’re going to need
to understand and develop brotherhood. That’s the topic of Chapter 1.
September 11th was a wake-up call
to our humanity. Failing to heed it will surely doom us to a dire harvest of
inhumanity, of which that day was but a foretaste. And heed it we must if we are
to rededicate ourselves to our unfinished task of freedom, so those who died on
that tragic morning shall not have died in vain—so the sacrifice they
consummated can become fruitful for humanity.
[i]
Wall Street Journal, Op-Ed article entitled A New Marshall
Plan by Albert R. Hunt,
December 20, 2001
, page A17.
[ii]
King, Martin Luther, Jr., A Testament of Hope, New
York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Page 269.
© John Alexandra,
March, 2002
| |
|
