I wrote this 22 years ago. It’s on my website somewhere. I think it still holds up.
How will this day be remembered?
Years from now, 9.11.01 may be remembered alongside 12.7.41 (Pearl Harbor) as a day that awoke a nation. Or perhaps it will take on the same tone as 11.22.63, the day that JFK was assassinated, and the hopefulness and exuberance of a modern-day Camelot was swept away.
It’s also possible that the unseen events of the coming months and years may cast it more in the context of 6.6.44, the day the Allies launched the mighty strike that ultimately upended the evils of national socialism.
And it may yet go down as the beginning of a convulsion that wrapped the rest of the world into the clutches of the intractable hatred that has gripped the Middle East for decades, centuries, and millennia.
It seems a sad but foregone conclusion that there will be more violence. The past holds harsh lessons that seem to point to different conclusions depending on who is sniffing the winds of history.
There are plenty among us, on both sides of a conflict that has now reached our shores, who conclude that violence is the answer. The only difference appears to be in the size of the bombs available to carry forward the message.
Violence certainly seemed the answer in the 1940s as the mighty arsenal of democracy spooled up to crush the unmitigated evil that Hitler had visited on Europe. Violence seemed the answer on Aug. 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay lifted off for Hiroshima, Japan, to strike a blow designed to bring the misery and slaughter of a Pacific War to a close, a campaign of death and destruction perpetrated by the Japanese militarists that exceeded the horror of Nazism by orders of magnitude.
Thirty years ago, on September 5, 1972, a Palestinian group called Black September thought violence was the answer when its members stormed the Israeli quarters at the Olympic Village in Munich. For reasons not materially different than those motivating people in Palestine today, the gunmen demanded the release of 200 Arab prisoners from Israeli jails and safe passage for themselves and their hostages out of Germany. Hours later, all 11 Israeli hostages, five of the gunmen, and one German police officer were dead — all but two the result of a botched rescue attempt.
Thirty years later, on September 5, 2002, someone thought violence was the answer when they sought to assassinate Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.
Five minutes ago, someone somewhere in the civilized realm we call the United States thought violence was the answer when he committed a crime against some person he probably randomly picked out because somewhere, somehow, he lost sight of the fact that that stranger is his brother, his sister, his mother, his father, himself. He just can’t see that anymore.
Either do you and I when we look at the person next to us or staring blankly at us from the pages of the Newspaper or the flickering glow of CNN and see “other.”
In retrospect, the War of American Independence seems like a just war. So does our entry into the two great global conflicts of the last century. But at the root of that sentiment lies a dangerous trap. When is it right and just to kill, and when isn’t it?
What, I wonder, has changed since then?