Two days from today church bells will ring and headlights will
be on all over America. In New York City churches, synagogues and,
yes, mosques, will hold services commemorating the 3,000-plus men,
women and children whose lives were snuffed out on September 11,
2001. The television networks and cable news channels will try to
show something appropriate. That is, something contemplative and
forward-looking. Several will succeed, though some will find the
temptation to relive the horror of the attacks irresistible and
will show hijacked aircraft flying into the World Trade Center
towers and the towers falling.
Over the weekend many newspapers explored the ways families of
the 3,000 victims have reordered their fractured lives.
“Reconciliation” seems to be the operative word here. It is
certainly not the fashionable “closure,” for there is no such thing
when one’s spouse, parent, sibling or child is suddenly gone. One
cannot pack away all the memories of that missing life and its
relationships and tuck them, neat as a pin, in a recess of the
mind.
Then there are the several thousand who survived the attacks.
Once the shock wore off, most experienced what is called
post-traumatic stress. Our elder son was one of these. He is a bond
broker, whose office that day was on the 84th floor of the South
Tower. In 1993, he worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 102nd floor
of the North Tower when the truck bomb went off in the basement.
That earlier day, with power out, he and his colleagues walked down
102 floors to the street. This time, when he looked up from his
desk to see flames shooting out of the tower next door, he decided
to head for the stairwell. So did some of his colleagues. Others
stayed.
At the 44th floor, they went out to the elevator lobby and heard
a public address announcement to the effect that it was safe to
return to their offices. Dick and some others decided to head back
to the stairs and keep going down. At about the 37th floor they
were nearly knocked over by the shock to the building of the second
hijacked aircraft hitting it (at about where his office had been).
They kept going and walked out to safety.
Two days later, by then deeply depressed, he said in a telephone
conversation, “Why me?” — a question repeated by many who survived
intact. I said, “Because God has other things for you to do. What
they are isn’t apparent now, but in time they will be.” Like many
others, he sought counseling, came to terms with the problem and
has long since been at work productively in a new office.
Why me? Why us — as a nation? The answer is not — as the
blame-America-first crowd would have it — that we have caused
poverty and hopelessness in the Arab/Muslim world. The answer is
certainly not — as some Arab state leaders would have it — that
we are too supportive of Israel. The “why” lies in a combination of
things in that world: too much autocracy, high birthrates,
incomplete education systems, too many young adult males with too
few job prospects and the siren song of radical clerics who long to
turn the clock back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th
century when, in their imagination, everything was perfect.
When the West gradually moved to secular, civil societies and
the Renaissance, much of the Muslim world moved in the other
direction, its great tradition of scientific and intellectual
inquiry shunted aside. Today, Turkey is the one model of a Muslim
state that is resolutely modern and secular, but it must work at
that effort constantly in order to maintain it . There is hope in a
few others (Algeria and Kazakhstan come to mind).
What we saw on September 11-last is the face of evil. (My
dictionary describes “evil” as “Morally corrupt, wicked; producing
or threatening sorrow, distress or calamity.”) All 19 of those
young men were Arabs and all had succumbed to a distortion of Islam
that caused them to believe they would end up in Paradise for
murdering innocent people. While we must remind ourselves this
September 11 that these men do not — by a long shot — represent
all Islam or all Arabs, the states of that world need to look in
the mirror and consider the real causes of the events that were
intended to strike terror into the American people.
