Saturday, September 17, 2011

Ten Years of War, An Imagined Forgiveness Unbound and a Truly Radical Response to 9.11.01

Ten years. It's remarkable. With all the hype of this last week I am hesitant to add even more to the 9-11 remembrance frenzy. But I have been thinking about this event and wanted to put down some thoughts.

We were attacked that day. As a nation it seems, we were struck. Almost three thousand people lost their lives. It was a horrible, jaw-dropping tragedy of tremendous proportions. Everyone walked around like they had knives in their hearts. I remember going, instinctively, to St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, my church in Charleston, and sitting at a wooden pew, amid the calm and colorful stained glass, the vaguely indifferent Christs with their hands weakly raised in blessing (why isn't he ever smiling?). Rhett was there too, wandering among the stained glass. And I sat alone and wept. The people outside walked around like they were in a daze or actual shock. The dead eyes. The distant looks. The slow walk. The noticeable absence of laughter and smiling.

At church this Sunday we had a remembrance service at the National Law Enforcement Memorial. Prayers for peace. For healing, for restoration. For love. For forgiveness.

The lessons I read that morning were all about forgiveness. Joseph forgives his brothers who threw him in a well and left him to die but thought better of it and instead sold him to an Egyptian slavers. Years later when Joseph becomes powerful and his brothers are the epitome of the powerless, dusty and starving and begging for his forgiveness, he pardons them. In the Gospel we hear Jesus' parable about the slave who was forgiven a 10,000 talent debt (an unimaginable sum) who refuses to pardon the 100 talent debt of his peer.

Pastor Tom noted in his sermon the unplanned but significantly important occurrence of these texts on this day. Forgiveness. Are we to forgive? How? Who are we to forgive? Those who wrong us? Al Qaeda? Terrorists? Peter asks Jesus how many times he is to forgive a brother who wrongs him. Jesus says if you are counting you’re missing the point.

And yet what did we do? Did we turn the cheek as a nation? Or did we cry out for revenge? Three thousand Americans lost their lives that day. An eye for an eye mentality (to many not a very “Christian” response) would have said we should have killed three thousand terrorists in return. But we did not take an eye for an eye. For our eye we took an eye and a tooth and a tongue and an ear and both legs and an arm. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them civilians: children, women and the elderly. Killed in the night in terrifying aerial attacks, some not even delivered by fighter pilots but by armed and silent drones in the sky. Were we going to win the “war on terrorism” by ourselves using the tools of terror? Night time raids, terrifying drone strikes from the sky, holding prisoners without cause or reason almost indefinitely? This is who we are?

What else could we have done? It seems now that there was only one response. This was an act of war. And so: “they will have war.” I think history will remember this first war of the 21st century as a 20th century reaction to a 21st century problem. We thought to solve a transnational problem of international scope like terrorism we would invade a nation. That a plot that unfolded across the globe in wide variety of countries (including Germany!) would suddenly be seen as rooted in just one state? It was a state reaction to a non-state actor. (Such a funny phrase, “non-state actor” – I imagine freelance Soviet theater bums; fired by the state, they have become “non-state” actors.)

The technological execution of combat however, would be highly 21st century, though. An analyst in Langley, VA, types in some coordinates in a computer. An armed, unmanned drone in the sky above Afghanistan drops a hundred pound bomb at those coordinates. The explosion is mostly unseen from an American point of view, the consequences even more so. What does a hundred pound bomb hitting the ground look like? What does it do to buildings? To people? To lives? We are totally removed from it. War and human suffering made even more distant, made even more detached, trivialized. Made into a video game.

In a sort of sense, this was the non-war. The nobody’s war. (With of course the notable exception of those executing it). This was the war that really seemed to be so far removed from the general populace’s consciousness that it wasn’t even happening. This was a war that the media only covered extensively when things were really bad, and I guess there is not much you can blame them for, given that it was a decade long. We had prosecuted this war, with its duration and scope, with fewer men and women than any previous war, so very few of us know the sons and daughters who have gone off to fight in it. It hasn’t scarred our consciousness the way Vietnam did. No one even had to pay for it. We weren’t asked to give a patriotic contribution or a “war tax.” The war would be free! We had a surplus! (Remember those days and the “problem” of what to do with it?).

What else could we have done in the face of this attack? We could have said: no more. Three thousand people have died this morning. We will mourn those people. We will support those families. But we will also be more vigilant. We will defend ourselves, so that no future blood will be spilled. That shall be our prime goal. We will launch a “war” to save lives and prevent bloodshed. We will build up our security at ports and harbors and airports and train tunnels. We will spend as much as it takes. We will work with international partners to beef up our understanding of this group, this non-state actor known as Al Qaeda and we will bring them to justice. We know the world is chaotic – it was on September 10, 11 and 12. And it will continue to be. We will not try to dupe you into thinking that the chaos and the danger of the world can be driven back completely. But as long as we are not afraid, they have lost. We will respond to their radicalism of hatred with a radicalism of love. Our forgiveness, foolish as it may seem or be, will, in its quiet, soft way, break their hatred and their fear. As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “The soft overcomes the hard… the gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”

What would the consequences of this kind of radicalism be?

We cannot know. What is done is done. And in this sense this is all just idle imagining. The unbinding of an irresponsibly loving forgiveness. I can’t see that response ever coming from any president.

And this is where we hit on the real fact that this is not an American response to an American tragedy. This is a human response to a human tragedy. I remember looking at the TV with those smoking towers and thinking, “Send me to war.” That seems unbelievable now. But that was my first reaction, a human reaction, and the reaction of millions. Immediate vengeance. You did this to us, and we will do this to you. This is simply human. Who could forgive in that moment?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how (could?) the same scriptures I read on Sunday could be used not for forgiveness but for vengeance. How a more conservative reading of the Bible would find “evildoers” and praise the wars as patriotic defense of our nation, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties. How do you “read around” forgiveness? How does a language of forgiveness and peace get converted into one of retribution and war?

Ten years later, can we forgive? If we can, what would that mean? And if we can’t?

2 comments:

Josh R. said...

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation and the need to act from a place of love.

I believe that one of the primary reasons that it is so difficult to react to situations with love, kindness, compassion, and empathy is because the positive consequences of such reactions are oftentimes not immediately clear. That is in stark contrast with the immediate gratification that we get when we scream at someone who has wronged us or wage war against a group that has attacked us.

chris said...

Josh - Thanks for your comment and I'm glad you enjoyed the post.

And you make a good point. The non-violent response to violence seems to lack any appreciable reaction, at least at first. The gut reaction is to respond to violence with violence. The real question I think is how we restrain and direct that human (not just American) response toward more positive and constructive enterprises...

Incidentally, after writing this post, I read an article in Harpers magazine about non-violent resistance in Palestine, following the Gandhi model. Some of the quotes were really powerful. I wonder how things would have been different if the US responded to 9-11 in a nonviolent way? (I also read another really influential article in Harpers on the pacifist movement in WWII in the US - which is perhaps the most extreme and pure form of pacifism (ie, nonviolence even to Hitler?)).

I am toying with the idea of another post tying these two threads together...