Attacks must prompt America to examine itself

BY ALEX DEMILLE

COURTESY NEWSMAKERS

That question haunted me as I watched plumes of black smoke billowing out of the Manhattan skyline on the morning of Tues., Sept. 11.

A good number of Palestinians seem to believe that there is no gap in accountability between the American people and the American government, as evidenced by their dancing and cheering upon hearing the news of the tragedy. It is this same mentality that allows suicide bombers to blow away innocent Israelis and believe that they have scored a moral victory against the Israeli government.

On Tuesday, these perverse beliefs were played out on a grander and more horrific scale, as thousands of Americans paid with their lives for the sins, real or imagined, of their government. Such is the nature of terrorism. Such is the nature of war.

All of our prayers go out to the families and friends of the thousands of innocents murdered in the Sept. 11 massacre. Yet between the mourning and grief must also come intelligent and informed assessment of these awful events. How did we get to this point in our history, when foreign agents from distant lands would go to such great lengths to murder citizens of our nation and destroy our symbols of power?

The attacks on Tuesday were deliberate attacks on our very way of life, on the way that the entire world is structured. The greatest symbol of global capitalism was wiped off the face of the earth. The nerve center of the most powerful and expansive military in the world was blasted wide open. These attacks were messages as much as murders.

From now on, there will be a very real and very grave connection between the actions of the American government and military and the safety of the average American citizen. Tuesday's carnage has drawn this connection in blood and seared it forever into the collective consciousness of the entire nation.

These uncomfortable realities require a closer look at what has awakened such rage in the Islamic fundamentalist movement. They beg unsettling questions. How different is the mentality that accepts killing Israeli civilians as a way of opposing the Israeli government and the mentality that justifies devastating sanctions that have lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis from sickness and starvation—sanctions which are essentially destroying an entire society? How different is the hypocrisy of the Islamic extremists who ask for peace even as they kill and the American government that reveres freedom and democracy in its own land even as it systematically arms governments that seek to undermine it through assassination and torture? The suggestion that the terrorists were justified in their actions is wholly sadistic. And yet it is naïve to think that the American government has no innocent blood on its hands, that foreign anger against America is completely unfounded. Somewhere between these two extremes we can find truth.

This event has hardened the hearts and minds of most Americans, most obviously the friends and relatives of the victims. I did not lose any family or friends on Tuesday. I do not pretend to understand the grief and anger of those who did. I don't. I never will. For me, understanding and dealing with Tuesday's nightmare is at once an exercise in empathy and at the same time an exercise in distancing myself emotionally from the events in order to understand them more clearly. The latter is a luxury I can afford, albeit with difficulty, by being fortunate enough not to have lost a loved one. The former—empathy—is part of the key to understanding why our nation is the focus of so much hatred around the world, particularly in the Middle East.

In a completely rational world, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis as a result of American sanctions would be as horrifying as those of our own people suffering and dying at the hands of terrorists. In a rational world, the murder of Kurds by the Turkish government using American-supplied weapons would stir as much moral outrage as the renegade Osama bin Laden using his resources and supplies to fund terrorism abroad.

Needless to say, we do not live in a rational world. As compassionate as we may be, we sit behind an empathy gap as wide as an ocean; a gap that does not allow us to put our tragedy and our grief on an equal footing with the tragedy and grief of other people in other lands, especially when our own government is partly responsible for their suffering.

This is not a condemnation. Rather, this phenomenon is an integral part of human nature. The question now is this: Will we let this nature govern our actions and overtake our powers of reason?

On Tuesday night's TV news coverage, Dan Rather said that we can now add "Remember the World Trade Center" to the litany of rallying cries that echo through American history, from "Remember the Alamo" during the Mexican-American War and "Remember the Maine" in the Spanish-American War to "Remember Pearl Harbor" following the Japanese attack that began our military involvement in World War II.

I pray that we do not follow Rather's suggestion. I pray that Tuesday's tragedy will spawn something more significant than another battle cry, another simplistic prelude to another bloody war. There are specific reasons why Tuesday's terrorists directed their sadistic rage at our shores. If we deny this fact, if we let our patriotic solidarity and justified anger and grief blind us to the realities of our government's actions around the world, then we will have learned nothing from the tragedy. We will have cheapened the memories of those lost to us forever. And that would be another tragedy unto itself.

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