Ten Years After

The part we all agree upon is the tragedy. The senselessness of the attacks. The heroism of the firefighters and policeman who ran forward into the carnage and died as a result. The selflessness of soldiers who answered their country’s call and have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The widow who wondered how long after 9/11 she should keep her husband’s toothbrush by the sink. The scar left on our national psyche. The determination not to let the bad guys win. The reality that we now submit to full body scans after we remove our shoes, belts and jackets, empty our pockets, present our computers and Ziplock bags of toiletries just to get on an airplane. The way the images of the towers of the World Trade Center falling are seared into our brains. The beauty of the crystal clear blue sky that day. The stories of courage of the passengers of United flight 93 who took a vote and decided to overpower their hijackers. The way phrases like “Let’s Roll” or “Ground Zero” now have sacred meaning. There were three thousand or so victims that day, and tens of thousands of ways that day has affected us.

What we don’t agree upon is what it all meant. In the days immediately following the terrorist attacks, I wondered “Why do they hate us so much?” I heard the President say it was because they were enemies of freedom, but I later heard Osama Bin Laden credited as saying “If we wanted to attack freedom, we would have attacked Sweden.”

What we also don’t agree upon is how to respond. To his credit, George Bush never said “Go shopping” to the American people immediately after 9/11. He did encourage us to get on with life as normal, but he never stated that in terms as crass as “Go shopping.” I felt Bush’s statements and activities in the days immediately following the attacks were very good.

To his discredit, George Bush started “The War on Terror,” which has cost more American lives than were lost on 9/11 and over a trillion dollars. Anyone but me notice the irony that our fractured Congress has a special deficit reduction committee working to figure out how to reduce our national debt by $1.2 trillion? That is approximately what we spent in the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither Bush nor Obama presented a plan to the Congress or the American people of how to pay for the war(s) we have been fighting. Want to save $1.2 trillion? Don’t invade the Middle East.

I mentioned words that have become part of national lexicon above, and you can add “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantanamo Bay” to that list. The problem with choosing to fight back is that you wind up taking on the characteristics of your enemy. We didn’t learn a blessed thing from our involvement in Vietnam. Don’t you remember My Lai? Every “Cowboy Justice” Western that’s ever been made has illustrated this truth, where, by the end of the movie, it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I lament our national addiction to “Cowboy Justice.”

For me, this is more than a matter of citizenship. It’s a religious issue. Last Monday I had a blog entry posted on “Think Christian” that speculated on what it would have been like for us to choose compassion instead of vengeance as a response to 9/11. There has been an ongoing debate on that site over my post since. I recognize not all Christians agree with me, but I believe the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ is compassion. I believe when Jesus said “love your enemies” he didn’t mean go kill them. I believe when he told Peter that people who “live by the sword die by sword” he was telling the truth. As much as my heart breaks over the losses of 9/11, I still have no idea what that has to do with our decision to invade Iraq. I see more of a connection between 9/11 and our involvement in Afghanistan, but I wonder ten years later what in the world we are still doing there.

We had a poignant time of silence while a bell was struck ten times at church this morning. Then we sang America the Beautiful and later we sang My Country ‘tis of Thee. I had mixed feelings about the songs. To the extent we sang them to honor the memory and suffering of all those directly affected by the terrorist attacks a decade ago, I sang along with gusto. To the extent that we sang them to endorse “The War on Terror,” I felt conflicted. Such is often my lot in life. Maybe I just think about things too much. I’m going to stop thinking about this now and go watch both the Detroit Lions and Detroit Tigers this afternoon. That luxury, a luxury people in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly don’t have, may well be part of the problem. I don’t know. I’m not going to think about it anymore.