Boldt Words & Images: On the anniversary of 9/11

The first airplane hit 15 year ago, at precisely 8:46:40 a.m.

By Bob Boldt

I went back over my archives and found the piece below, which I wrote on Sept, 20th, 2001.
    Looking back with 20/20 wisdom on my naive ramblings of fifteen years ago, I am amazed at the transformation that has occurred both within my own consciousness and in the consciousness of our country. For one thing, I have become more intolerant of the neoliberals as being nearly as irrational as the neocons and ISIS. I hope I might be excused for not suspecting, at the time, that 9/11 might have actually been an inside job by an administration so monstrously devious, so monumentally corrupt, and so unrelentingly incompetent that it finds almost no analog in past history. Even if the hands of our president have been washed clean of direct responsibility for the attacks, there is no doubt that this event was callously exploited solely for partisan political advantage, in order that the greed-heads could spy on their opposition, and mount a war for no other purpose than to make their cronies rich. In mounting this exploitation, these people were willing to place the lives, the fortunes, and the honor of the people of this county at risk.
    Here then is my essay:

The end of the world

Archibald MacLeish wrote:

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the Lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb –
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing – nothing at all.

    MacLeish’s metaphor of a circus tent rent to reveal the black void of night was dwarfed on September eleventh as a million eyes revealed a truth so horrid and inconceivable that it was as if madness were the only truth.

If a God had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we’d be spared so much suffering. But we made the world – out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad. –Edward Bond, Lear

    Is our faith merely a rag we stuff into the maw of death – a veil with a beautifully rendered portrait of Christ, Muhammad, Abraham, or Buddha on it that covers the unnamable void of chaos?

It seems to me that the present crisis presents possibly an unparalleled opportunity for leaders of all the world’s religions to meet in an ecumenical conference to attempt to assess the situation of the world at the present time and to make recommendations to the world governments as to what is the most sane and survivable course we must take.
    One of the most important issues we must face is that of religious fundamentalism. Too long the mainstream religious leaders have stood by while the zealots in our midst preach their “gospels” of intolerance and hate. We see it in this country most recently in the remarks of the Rev. Falwell. I do not want to get into an argument or name names, but the modern world is no longer a place where religions can proclaim their exclusive inside track to the Almighty and treat other peoples only as souls to be saved or dammed.
    Actually the Rev. Falwell was instrumental in showing me a valuable lesson. A lot of people on the left are saying that we brought this on ourselves. It is a compelling argument based on everything from our historic treatment of the Indigenous tribes of North America during conquest all the way up to our knee-jerk support for Israel over the Palestinians. Even though these are issues that need addressing, blaming the atrocities of September 11, 2001 on the United States rings as hollow as saying that God had lifted his protection from us because we have not persecuted Pagans, homosexuals, and abortionists.

    The truth is: hateful people destroyed countless, precious lives, including their own, in order to express some perverted idea of divine vengeance. Yes, everyone connected with the plot should be brought to justice. And yes, it may take a measure of sanctioned violence to bring them to that justice. But it should not be done with hatred and rage. I know that is easier said than done. We are a culture of law, a people who are capable of behaving rationally. What did Jesus mean when he said “Turn the other cheek,” if not this? There is a purpose here besides merely telling our people, who are justifiably enraged, that they should not lust after the blood of the aggressor. That purpose must be spoken from every mosque, church, and temple in the world: That the Human Race has finally run out of options. We must all love each other or die. And that is roughly why I believe the world religious and spiritual leaders should as soon as possible convene a conference of unity to address these issues. Many may say that unity is impossible, that factionalism and theological divisions lie too deep. I say that we must try. No other voice can still the too long unchallenged cries of religious fundamentalism with their terror and willingness to shed human blood. At the very least, the leaders could let them know that these fanatics can no longer call on the name of Christ, Muhammad, or Abraham to legitimize their causes.

We can and probably will eventually bring many of those responsible for this atrocity to justice. But that will not end the issues here. We must apply our intelligence to search deeper for the causes behind the events and issues. What most people in the U.S. really don’t seem to get is just how much we are hated in certain parts of the world. Some of it is based on envy, and some of it is based on true cause. The people who worked on the 100th floor of the south tower didn’t think that Henry Kissinger ordered the coup in Chile. They had pictures of their children and wives on their desks that they were looking at when the building fell. The firemen who were dashing up the stairs did not have time to think, even for a second, about the hungry children in the decimated villages of Afghanistan. One of them was even saying his rosary to take his mind off the pain of his exertions as he moved higher and higher.
    Why do all these people hate us? They must be mad. We are good people. We love our families and pay our taxes. Look how we are capable of coming to each other’s aid in time of crisis. Not thinking of ourselves, sometimes even unto death.
    Not on our soil. We now have a small idea of how almost every other country on earth has felt at some point in its history: the feeling of complete vulnerability, the fear of the annihilation of our cities, and the possibility that our lives could be taken from us at the whim of someone half a world away. We need to use this feeling, this vulnerability, this fear of annihilation to allow us to finally understand what it must be like to live under brutal dictatorships in certain parts of South America. Perhaps we may even start calling ourselves Americans and mean, for once, that we belong to a hemisphere, not just to a country. This feeling could lead us to question a diplomat who flippantly refers to “collateral damage” in justifiable terms. This feeling could help us to understand that all our hearts are buried at Wounded Knee. This feeling may even help us to speak with the real authority of those who have suffered at the tables of power. In short, this feeling could make us true peacemakers.

And yet it is not enough to have feelings. We must go back to our history to study our original mission to the world. We must rediscover our own country and the experiment of independence and really hear the words “with liberty and justice for all” for the first time. We must also have the virtues of humility, courage, and love for the struggle ahead. We must become involved in the life around us: Our neighbors next door and at the end of the World Wide Web on the other side of the world. We may even want to leave the TV off. And yet this is only a preparation for the action that will be the fruit of all this present pain and preparation.
    First, we must make the life and care of our children the most important consideration of our lives. Not just our children, although that is a good place to start, but the world’s children. We must make it a goal that no child anywhere on earth should be hungry, unloved, hurt, or in any way subjected to violence of any kind, including war. The restored section of the Pentagon should have offices in it whose mission should be dedicated to the study of the effects of armed conflict on children and how it might be possible to minimize the effects of war on these little ones.
    Second, we must find ways to turn around the head-long rush we seem to be making to destroy what is left of the planet. I don’t care whose statistic you use – it is not going to be possible for every Chinese, Russian, Afghani, Indian, Mexican (add whoever you want to add to the list) to have an SUV, a TV/DVD, an air conditioner, internet access, garbage pick-up every Tuesday, and two packs of cigarettes a day for life. We have taught the people of the world well and they all want exactly what we want. I cannot see how there is any hope for the survival of the human race under these circumstances, unless we (meaning the U.S.) also begin to practice a level of conservation that clearly the overwhelming majority of the people in this country seem unwilling to do. Of course, there is always technology, like creating a virus to eliminate half the world’s population, or sending them to live on Mars.
    Third, there must be some way to deal with the universal scourge of religious fundamentalism. To anyone who has applied their energies to a spiritual discipline, you know that it is difficult enough to keep on that path, to live a truly devout life, and to overcome one’s own hate, selfishness, and pride. How people who profess to be some of the most devout followers of Avatars of peace, love, and light can spout such hatred and perform acts of such fiendish cruelty causes me to wonder. The prayer I use to make my way through the world these days is often: “God, save me from people who know they are right.” I know what Jesus said about “No man cometh to the Father but by me.” Yet I find it impossible to believe that he could ever bless the Catholic/Spanish incursion into the “New World” or the decimation of Native cultures everywhere by the American Missionary movement.
    I do not need to be exclusively harsh on the Christians. Muhammad and the children of Abraham have plenty of blood on their hands as well. It seems almost like a pathology that, as soon as a person begins to follow a holy one whose simple message is to love God and your neighbor, to quote one example, he suddenly starts to feel that the path that he is on is the only one – indeed, the only true one.
    Of course, it is never enough for this person to merely follow this path to see where it leads, treading modestly in the footsteps of the Master. This person must tell others about it. Some whom he tells are moved by the beauty and simplicity of the message and are among the first followers. Others are not impressed and tell this person, in so many words, to mind his own business. These are the first infidels. The followers, instead of simply and beautifully following on their own way, now start to wonder about these infidels. The possibility that there might be other paths and other ways does not occur to them – they are so full of the spirit and the beauty of the way, etc. “No,” they say, “we cannot be wrong on this. Everyone knows there is only one God and only one Prophet to show mankind the way.” Suddenly these beatific practitioners of the simple path of love are sharpening knives and preparing instruments of torture. Soon there are the sounds of battle. The sacred books are no longer consulted for their inner paths but for helpful strategies in waging war. And dead bodies are now counted as devoutly as holy beads once were.

I wish that were a quaint fable from the 15th or 16th centuries, but unfortunately it is not. It seems that those same old struggles that misguided academics would like to have relegated to the dustbin of history are more alive and virulent than ever. Remember, William Jennings Bryant won the Scopes Trial, and most Fundamentalist Christians see no reason to change that decision. Let us not even try to follow the logic of the Taliban or the Ultra Orthodox Jews. Does that mean that we have to abandon the central beliefs of the major monotheistic religions?
    That is probably not necessary in most cases. The reason the fundamentalists almost universally decry modern society is precisely because of its diversity. We may need to impress on the less militant of our religious followers the necessity of reigning in the more violent and intolerant of their factions. This may be an impossible task. It may be that the desire to be right and the resulting intolerance of our brothers and sisters is hard-wired into the human nervous system. Even if this is true, we still must try. The alternative is unthinkable.
                                                                        Peace

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Boldt