:: Wednesday 12 September 01
Thing that broke my heart this morning: watching the mother of a guy who managed to make a cell-phone call out from the plane that crashed in PA, on Good Morning America. She was shaky-voiced but composed, describing her last conversation with her son, talking about his strength and resourcefulness, and expressing her belief, or hope, that he and the other passengers had been able to thwart the hijackers' plans to crash the plane into a target. Had managed to crash it into empty countryside instead, killing them all, of course.
God, it would be good to think so; to imagine that they had some inkling of what was going down, some foreknowledge--though of course they didn't know the full scope of the day's horror--that in giving up their own lives they were perhaps saving those of other innocents. A kind of suicide mission I can get behind.
I've been trying to focus on the innumerable expressions, or acts, of care and compassion that have occurred: the rescue teams, working at imminent threat to their own lives; the huge lines at the blood banks; the voices of sorrow and grief from around the world.
I can understand the anger and the vengeful rage that many have been expressing, but I keep repeating to myself, over and over, Gandhi's line: An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.
And I keep returning to the point Jason Kottke makes--that this isn't an American issue, it's a human issue. The media catchphrase yesterday was "This changes everything." Well, yes, maybe for Americans it does. And of course the scope and scale of this act is extraordinary. But the act itself, the blindness and fanaticism driving it, are nothing new at all; the suffering of the innocents is nothing new. It's old news for many people in many parts of the world.
A quandry. In the short run, yes, pragmatically, action must be taken. I understand geopolitical realities. But in the larger sense--well, the Handdarata, the foreseers in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, say To oppose something is to maintain it. If you're walking away from Mishnory, you are still on the Mishnory road. I can't help thinking that we--we humans, not we Americans or Palestinians or any other subgroup of the species--we have to start walking on a different road. I don't know how to get there. All I know right now is I don't want to see Afghani citizens walking dazedly through the rubble, sobbing, any more than I want to see Manhattanites doing the same. Americans are expressing outrage over the footage of Palestinians cheering the WTC attacks; but I recall Americans cheering the same way at the bombing of Iraqi cities. Cities, full of ordinary people, trying to live their lives.
Fight fire with fire, and you burn down the world.
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"Our vocation is not a sphinx's riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish. Some people find, in the end, that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way."
--Thomas Merton