As an American, 9/11 is--and will be for many years to come--an important day. On that particular day, we lived in Staten Island and I was at home. I personally lost no one close to me so my loss is not as keenly felt as many others, but there is loss.
I was shopping with my baby Esther. We'd gone for an early morning trip to the grocery store to get the weeks' shopping done. I was in a bit of a hurry because I had an 11am lesson with my teacher, Bill Schumann who lived on upper west side. Passing from the ferry thru World Trade Center was my route that day. Had I had a lesson one hour earlier it is entirely foreseeable I would be dead today.
While in the store things happened, people froze and then screams started to emerge from the front where there was an electronics store with TVs in the windows. Everyone seemed near frozen in place, then all pandemonium broke out and we all began rushing for the doors and our cars.
The next few hours were tense ones with my wife calling me on the phone from school where she taught and where our children attended, assuring me everything was ok. We had F15's flying over head up and down the island, and of course, all the firefighters for NYC live predominantly on Staten Island, rushing to help their brothers in harms way. So many did not come home that day to their families.
My oldest daughter's best friend's father was one of those men. The mother had a clear view from the northern tip of Staten Island of WTC where her husband's office was. She watched it come down knowing he was inside, having received a phone call from him saying he was about to die. The collateral damage of that has even scarred my own daughter as she vicariously lived thru this ordeal with her young friend. To make matters worse, thru the years bystanders will often say that it is old news, that people need to get over it. People never will.
The worst memory I have of the day, and the hardest to forgive is the fact the teacher for my son's classroom left campus out of fear. She simply walked out of my son's classroom, picked up her own child from another classroom and left, leaving my son's entire class unattended in a moment where we didn't know if we were at war. She didn't check out with the front desk. She just bolted. She was a substitute so perhaps her appalling behavior can be explained. And it happened again a few days later when we were getting bomb scares on Staten Island. The same woman left her classroom. I'll never forgive her for that.
But mostly, I not yet forgiven myself for falling in line with the general consensus that led to our beginning a war over this terrible act of terrorism. We wanted revenge. Its easy to say now, but there was this moment where I thought to myself: "But wait. Isn't this retribution precisely what they want? We say we are a Christian nation. Does 'turn the other cheek' not apply here?" I believe to this day, educated by hindsight and idealism, that we missed our defining moment as a country. It would nearly have been impossible, but we could have forgiven those that persecuted us, thereby not playing into the fundamentalists' hand. The biblical imperative of 'forgive 70 X 7 times' is a rough one, but why was it never talked about, even in our churches?
Its a naive thought, but worth speculating. What is the best defense against those who would harm us? And even more importantly, can harm be totally avoided?
I think our governments want us to think it can. Of course, there is a reasonable level of security we ought to expect those to whom we pay taxes and entrust our lives. Only, I worry that we've lost sight of 'reasonable' in hopes of some type of nirvana of safety. We'll never entirely wipe out the ability of a terrorist attack. Liberty demands we don't. And the harder we try to secure our freedom from terrorists the harder they'll try to hurt us. Yes? No? I don't know....
I want to believe that by ramping down our determination to wipe out all those that oppose us, we will more quickly find peace with those who would harm us. Speaking from first hand experience, there will never be agreement between fundamentalists and the rest of the world. There never will. We can only hope to outlast them.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both"-Ben Franklin
