We must bear witness…

9/11/01 evening in Tallahassee FL

Our wishes go out to all of us who suffered and who died in the hate-filled attacks on thousands of innocent men, women, and children this morning.

They go out to all of us who are outraged and angered by this attack on our lives and our country.

They go out as well to those of us who for what ever reasons, are so angered by the US that they feel they must attack us and who find our pain and suffering a cause for celebration.

I’m in shock at the human toll this attack has taken. But I’m also bewildered. In all of the analysis and speculation so far, I have not heard anyone ask "What have we done to anger them so?"

I did hear a woman cry out in horror and disbelief on the evening news "Who could do something like this?"

I shuddered when I heard this because like most of us, she didn’t seem to know that the response from many people in developing nations all around the world would be "The United States has done this to us many times."

Were we to hear this we could ask, "When?" "Where? Give me instances, specifics!"

"OK - Vietnam and South East Asia for starters, which was never about helping the Vietnamese… And the US supported terror campaigns in Indonesia, E. Timor, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Columbia, the Middle East, Africa, – wherever the big international corporations had interests that could be expanded…" (more specifics...)

"Wait a minute! I never heard about these?"

"Why not? Here are some facts. Go check them out yourself…"

And so this dialogue we will never hear on TV may go.

Instead we are being led to fan the flames of nationalism and war.

"We are at war!" our leaders tell us.

"With who?" we ask.

"With whoever did this, and whatever countries gave them aid"

"What does that mean?" Will bombing Iraq some more, or Afghanistan, solve anything?

If hatred is at the root of these attacks, will killing more innocent people put an end to it?

As discomforting as it may be, there seems to be only one answer to the cruelty and ignorance we witnessed this morning and it is not the vengeful beating of swords and waving of the flag that many of our leaders espoused today.

If America needs a rallying point, a commitment, a resolve, let it be this:

We must bear witness both to the cruelty and oppression we have done to others in the past, as well as what was done to us this day.

We should not seek a swift and vengeful retribution, but rather search our hearts for a way to end forever the violence and bloodshed that has characterized our human experience as far back as any of us can remember. We must end it! 

We must sadly recognize for instance that just as the CNN broadcast of the killing and destruction in two American cities this morning played to a few cheering crowds abroad, we in America cheered at a human horror nightly in Baghdad on CNN’s evening news 10 years ago during the Gulf war.

We cheered as if we were watching a combination fire works show / weapon demonstration, with no sense of the horror we were delivering to innocent men women and children on the ground. We were told we were only blowing up buildings – that these were the smart bombs.

But by the end of the bombing, many thousands of people were dead, many homes destroyed. . After 10 years of bombing Iraq over 100,000 children have been killed. The Iraqi people must have felt, must feel, much the way we feel today.

Same for the people of the Sudan, East Timor, Nicaragua, and too many other places for us to pretend to take the high road in response to this act of terror today.

We Americans see ourselves as the "good guys" and I believe we are. We are a fair-minded, heart-felt people – kind, generous and strong.

But we may need to take a look at what so many people around the world are saying about what our country has done to them. Our government may not have been the good guy, and if that’s true we the people have been snookered. We must find the truth, and bear witness to it.

There is no other healing.

There is no other response that will truly honor our suffering and dead today.

…Quixote, Tallahassee (posted 9/15)