I was at my usual seat in the
wonderful Library of Congress reading room, when they announced it
was closing immediately. There’d
been attacks. There might be more. D.C.’s streets were incredibly
clogged with traffic fleeing the Capitol area. I was especially glad
to be on a motorcycle. At supper that evening at a rooftop
restaurant, we could see smoke from the Pentagon. The next morning, 
Much of the world, including Muslims, was appalled. The U.S. would find and punish those responsible. The world sympathized. But the Bush Administration used 9/11 to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq. (Saddam Hussein was a colossal jerk, but no lover of Al-Qaeda, which loathed secular leaders such as Saddam.) This was a huge gift to Islamic militants, whose rhetoric about the U.S. wanting to kill Muslims was sounding hollow, until the U.S. started doing just that.
Twenty years. As we mourn those who died September 11th, and in those wars, and again thank the people of Gander, we must strive for enhanced international understanding.
The world is not descending into some apocalyptic battle between Muslims and Christians, or between Good and Evil.
But in too much of our world there’s an important struggle between the people who are curious, open, tolerant, and reluctant to judge others and the convinced, close-minded, incurious folks who rarely welcome change. I’m interested in what you believe, feeling no need to convert you to my spiritual ideas or be converted to yours. But if you are excluding, harassing, even killing others because of your beliefs, you’re wrong not only in my eyes but to most of those who follow the faith you are abusing. That’s true of the vicious and deluded members of ISIS – and folks who would kill doctors who perform abortions, or punish women for ending pregnancies.
Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad all saw the injustice, poverty, corruption, and sickness around them, and saw priests and leaders using others’ religious faith to further their own personal ambitions. Each articulated a new set of principles meant to improve the world, each spent periods in solitary contemplation, and each gathered a small band of followers to spread the word, and was persecuted by the authorities for that. Each tried to live as he preached. The words of each were taken to heart by many; but, eventually, religious empires called churches, mosques, or temples were founded on their words.
Jesus neither enslaved nor killed anyone, and never mentioned abortion, but His words have been used to justify wars and slavery, and harassing women for their personal choices. Muhammad taught equality of men and women as a basis for spirituality, and tried to improve women’s lot. (Female infanticide was common then, and he abolished it.) Born poor, and orphaned young, Muhammad understood poverty and social exclusion. His words are as irrelevant to harassing women as Jesus’s are to forbidding birth control.
I don’t say we do not face danger from extremist Islamic terrorists. We do. We also face danger from extremist “Christian” and “patriot” terrorists, who trample on Christian spirit and espouse conditional patriotism: they love the country they would like ours to be, although not the freedom, equality, and diversity that makes us US.
We have a wonderful country to protect.
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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 12 September 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[Aside from all that we all feel about 9/11, and aside from my being in D.C. then, the World Trade Center made it kind of personal. All my teenage years, and beyond, my father was the head of public relations for the Port Authority. (He was the guy who managed things when the Beatles first visited the U.S. and flew into JFK, our family had been pictured on a U.S. postage stamp about that airport early on, and he got the reporters’ phone calls on Saturday morning if some clown landed a plane on the George Washington Bridge or something.) He’d been in meetings when the towers were first conceived and approved, and claimed to have pointed out in one meeting (as the PR guy likely would), that if they made the towers just 100 feet taller, they’d be the tallest buildings in the world. His office had moved from 111 8th Avenue to the World Trade Center once the towers were up. I’d visited him there. Of course, by 2001 he’d been long retired from the Port Authority, and dead for five years; but I thought of how he’d have felt about the attack.]
[One thing I recall is that D.C. felt like a war zone for days, with helicopters flying overhead constantly. Another is how the attack saved Bush’s presidency. A Washington Post analysis days earlier had suggested he had little chance of re-election. Then, suddenly, his popularity in polls was record-setting. Countries don’t like being attacked, or told what to do by outsiders. That’s pretty universal, but our leaders so often fail to recognize it, and imagine that because the U.S. is so admirable and strong that locals won’t mind if we occupy their country for awhile, directing affairs. It’s for their own good. Somehow the dumb locals never quite seem to recognize that.]
[I feel sorry for Afghanis. I’d not care to live under the Taliban. (Or in Texas.) Women have experienced two decades of a more modern life. Young Afghanis have grown up in relative freedom. Now, it all goes dark. Over time, in their own way, factions we helped the Taliban unite will rebel, and the country will fracture into different factions, largely along ethnic lines. Meanwhile, the Taliban will be hospitable to terrorist groups that mean us no good, and mean moderate Islamic folks no good. It is not as clear to me as it always was with Viet Nam what history will say about all this, but I doubt history’s verdict will be kind to our leaders.]
[Meanwhile, I wish we could recover something of unity. We have urgent problems to solve, as a nation and as an international community, and distract ourselves with personal ambitions and petty squabbles.]
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