"Being rational and free, human beings are capable of being diabolic. This is a feat which no animal can duplicate, for no animal is sufficiently clever, sufficiently purposeful, sufficiently strong-willed or sufficiently moral to be a devil." (The Perennial Philosophy, p. 229, Aldous Huxley)
Dancing in the streets. Waving the flag. Boisterous gatherings from Times Square to Pennsylvania Ave. to L.A. and everywhere main street USA. Understandable. Let us be clear. There is no doubt evil in this world of ours. Evil that must be confronted, and, when absolutely necessary, eliminated. Such is part and parcel of the tragedy of human existence. Caution, however, should prevail. Let us not be overzealous. Zealots, it seems, are always blind.
I remember where I was when word came that JFK had been shot in Dallas. Mrs. Trinko's seventh grade American History class at Breckenridge Jr. High School. I was sitting behind Cathy Webb when another teacher knocked on the door, entered, and gave us the news.
When you're in the seventh grade, there's not enough lived experience to allow you to process such an event. I doubt most of us could even have spelled assassination. In a moment everything changed. We'd felt safe, but now, who knew if we were safe or not? I remembered my Dad telling my Mom one night in a conversation they thought I couldn't hear from my bedroom down the hall. "If the sirens go off, take Alan, and go downstairs to the shelter." Was that what was coming? Was it time to "duck and cover?" This was the moment that defined our generation.
Flash forward. September 11, 2001. The event that began to define my daughters' generation. I was probably one of the last people to find out what had happened. We were living in NH, and, as we all remember, it was a beautiful day. I got up, looked out the window, flipped on Surf Line, heard the waves were up--storm surge--tossed my board and wet suit in the back of the truck and made for the coast. An hour and a half before mid-tide. I could get there just in time.
Beaches in NH and ME, especially those frequented by surfers, are rocky and somewhat secluded. What summer crowds we are plagued with are gone by then. We rode for a couple hours, then just hung out, enjoying the day. Pease air base was just down the road. Huge tankers lumbered in and out every hour or so. Nothing unusual. A little body surfing on the low stuff and I decided to head home. 4:30 in the afternoon. Tossed the gear in back of the truck, headed out, and flipped on "All Things Considered." The coastal route 1A is lined with some pretty fancy digs, and I wondered why all the flags were at half-staff. It didn't take long to find out.
"Do you think an anti-missile system would have helped New York?" or some such thoughts were the first words I heard. To call this a WTF moment is an understatement. First thought: Somebody finally dropped the big one. Second thought: Is NYC still there? If memory serves, it was a good ten to fifteen minutes before they got around to repeating the headline. About the time I answered my cell to discover my wife, sobbing, had been trying to get in touch with me all day. "This isn't over, is it? It's not going to stop, is it?" was all she could get out.
As the horrors of the day were played again and again and again that night, I remember thinking how close to the brink we were. "What does it mean, Daddy? Is there going to be a war?"
I'd grown up with a Dad in defense, with dinner table stories of what the inside of Cheyenne Mountain looked like, bomb shelters in back yards and basements, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It meant our jets were in the air, our submarines at launch depth, missile crews out in the Montana desert on high alert. Nervous fingers on hair triggers. Nobody on either side of the ocean slept well that night. But we all woke up to a different world, again....
Fast forward. Okay. Ten years after. Got the bad guy. "Justice has been served." True enough, I suppose. And we didn't wipe out half a continent in the process. So maybe in some tragic way it's a step forward. But I think we disrespect 9/11 if we don't look a little deeper than that.
Violence, wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, is not limited to the use of the knife or the gun. The overt violence of the knife or gun is but an outward manifesting of the more subtle violence of real or perceived injustices to our fellows, to nature, and our willed separation from the Divine Source of Our Being.
Returning to Huxley on human suffering, at length: "The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature, and to our fellow men. If every human being were constantly and consciously in a proper relationship with his divine, natural and social environments there would be only so much suffering as Creation makes inevitable. But actually most human beings are chronically in an improper relation to God, Nature and some at least of their fellows. The results of these wrong relationships are manifest on the social level as wars, revolutions, exploitation and disorder; on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources; on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence." (p. 233.)
As Huxley is careful to point out, this is a fundamental truth of every religious expression; true for the Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Christian or obscure aboriginal tribesman. Everything stands or falls apart on proper relationship.
More precisely, if we are truly concerned about the violence of the gun and the knife; we cannot be content merely to trade eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. We have to go deeper than that and look at the root causes of suffering and address those issues such as economic inequality, poverty, and the insidious darkness that one finds in every religious fanatic--the tendency to elevate my faith to a position of absolute rightness against and above all others. More violence has been visited upon humankind in the name of that absurdity than any other. Killing in the name of God has to be the ultimate expression of human evil.
Is this celebration a bit misplaced? Probably. At least it's a bit too exuberant for my comfort. If only because so much of what I hear in the streets seems less a celebration of justice served and more of revenge carried out.
Ten years after. Okay. Got the bad guy. Now where do we go?
