A 9/12 flashback

I taught two college classes yesterday, 9/11. At the start, I told students that I did not have anything I particularly wanted to say to them about it. (It would take way too long, and I am not sure how I could speak about it without crossing too many political lines.) But we held a minute of silence in memory of those who lost their lives.

I did say that, at the time of the attacks, I was pastoring a rural church in western New York State. We were pretty far away from Manhattan, but as many members of my church served as members of the local, volunteer fire department and EMT squads, we took it all pretty personally.

Today I read Digby's post from yesterday, "9/11 Symbiosis", which triggered another set of memories from the 11th and the 12th. Like Digby, I "saw it coming". I remember weeping at a prayer service held at my school in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, weeping not only for the 1000's that had just died, but for the 10,000's that I knew would yet die in the backlash of vengeance-taking that would result from this country and above all from this administration. (In retrospect, I was wrong about quite how cold-bloodedly they would manipulate the national feeling into blind support for their longstanding, neocon plans for Iraq and so forth-- it turned out worse, in almost every way, than I feared.)

Digby, with a claim to a bit more instant geo-terror-political acumen than I, starts off like this:

You see, I knew --- I knew --- that bin Laden had just achieved a huge victory, perhaps a decisive one. This was not because of the attacks themselves or even the possibility of more in the future, which as horrible and dramatic as they are do not in themselves represent any kind of existential threat. This was because as an observer of the zeitgeist and the political scene for over 30 years at that point, I knew that our government and media would react to this event in exactly the way bin Laden hoped and that we would do to ourselves what the Islamic extremists could only dream of doing: turn the country into a permanent state of faux crisis --- and enable the authoritarian right wing of this country, which was unfortunately in power at the time, to pursue a doomed military empire, create a powerful imperial presidency and build the American style police state they had longed for for decades. I knew that they would run with this "opportunity" and run with it they did.

After that, we come back to the standard criticisms of The Regime, for example:

The problem is that this country simply cannot take an endless ginned-up "war" [which symbiotically benefits both] the Republican party and Islamic terrorists, and neither can the rest of the world. We have big problems to face and we need allies and cooperation to deal with them. Right now we are actively making things worse by allowing our government to pursue terrorism policies that create more of it.

Amen. But lots of us have been saying this in one way or another for a while. Yet, I think he ends the column just about right:

[BushCo's] torture and detention regime is making our country less safe and less free by creating more terrorists and degrading the US Constitution, but rather than dismantling it the Republicans are going to institutionalize it. It is only the latest of many such foolish actions our government undertook since 9/11. The question is whether we will continue to allow them to do Osama bin Laden's dirty work or if people of good sense will be able to resist their irrational warmongering and confront terrorists intelligently instead of giving them exactly what they want.

So, maybe "we" need to recall 9/11 and rededicate ourselves to the genuine struggle as we see it, a multifaceted, multi-front war:

• defending, yes!, against more acts of terror and destruction in our own nation,
• defending, also yes!, our nation's democracy and freedoms and Constitution ("against all enemies, foreign and domestic"--even in the White House) and legal system,
• defending human rights, humane values, and international comity, seemingly threatened now as much by our own nation (and by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon), as by anything that the al Qaedas of the world can do,
• seeking to unravel the political, economic and historical conditions that undergirded the existence and growth of terrorism even before The Regime poured kerosene on the flames (I think that we are reaping the whirlwind of EuroAmerican colonialism, among other things),
• and I reckon there are other fronts, as well.

I don't think it's enough to say, "See, I was right." Lincoln's words at Gettysburg seem to address the situation we face, I believe:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The immediate victims of 9/11 were not soldiers, as were the "honored dead" of Gettysburg. But the 2600 Americans killed in Iraq were (& killed in a war resulting from their own government's, their own CIC's, craven lies and manipulation, and not anything done by the hated Osama). I don't really think al Qaeda can kill American freedom. But we can, and our government is choking it off. The next best chance for that "new birth of freedom" comes with this fall's elections, I am sure. How can we best pursue that task, in the aftermath of 9/11-plus-5? I shudder to think of how 9/11-plus-7 will look if the fall elections do not bring changes to the Congress.