Dear Daphne,
A history teacher once told me to ask my parents what they were doing when they heard that JFK had been shot. Both of them remembered every detail. So will I, if one day you ask me what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001.
I was sitting in my cube when my friend Lisa stuck her head over the wall. “Howard Stern just said that someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center.”
Of course, I was thinking puddle-jumper. I immediately wrote Saru an e-mail: “What kind of idiot doesn’t see the World Trade Center?” I hit send, and then went to CNN.com. It wouldn’t load. I hit refresh. Still not loading. Half the country must have been trying to access this website. That’s when I knew that something had gone terribly, horribly wrong. And then, the second plane hit.
The thick black smoke pouring from the holes in the twin towers was like nothing I’d ever seen. Later, I’d read about the crowds of panicked people in the stairwells, trying desperately to evacuate the doomed buildings. I’d hear stories of husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, calling home to say goodbye. I’d see video of people leaping from the ruptured walls of the broken skyscrapers and plummeting to the debris-filled streets below. But at that moment, all I could think was They’ve got to get people out of those buildings. They’re going to collapse. And then, the buildings fell.
I spent the rest of the day in a daze, reading everything I could, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Another plane had crashed into the Pentagon, and still another had gone down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when passengers and crew decided that they’d rather die fighting the terrorists than die as their weapons.
Terrorists. This was pretty much all the media talked about for weeks. And one in particular, a man named Osama bin Laden, became the face of American fear. He even looked sinister. He was tall and skinny, and wore a wiry black beard streaked with grey. His brown eyes bored holes through my television screen every evening for months. I’d watch him with his groups of despots, celebrating the deaths of innocent Americans in the name of the prophet Mohammed, in the name of Islam. I watched thousands of his followers dancing in the streets over the joyous news that nearly 3000 American infidels were dead. I listened to tape after tape of him and his buddies talking at their cult of murderous fanatics, encouraging bloodshed, encouraging violence, encouraging suicide, encouraging jihad. Holy war. God loves it.
No, God does not.
Here’s the problem with faith: when you believe in something without proof of its existence, you get to interpret a lot of things for yourself.
That can be a good thing. Like when people who believe God doesn’t make mistakes interpret that to mean that when God made some people gay, he meant to, and it wasn’t just a colossal fuck-up where he accidentally damned a bunch of his creations to an eternity of blistering Hell.
But it can also be a bad thing. Like when Osama bin Laden misinterprets jihad. In Arabic, the word jihad means “struggle”. The internal struggle to stay faithful in the face of adversity. The struggle to improve society. The struggle to defend Islam. Jihad does not, in fact, even mean “holy war”, but try telling that to Osama bin Laden. To him, jihad means something closer to “force violent, painful, bloody death on people who don’t share my beliefs.”
And so he did. For nine more years, seven more months and twenty more days. Not again on American soil, but other places around the world, and always with the hope of blasting a few Westerners to pieces. I’d get on a plane to fly somewhere for work, or to Texas to visit our family, and I’d always look around for people who looked as if they might feel like killing me today. After you were born, I hated flying with you, not because you cried on the plane (mostly you didn’t), but because if some lunatic decided he wanted us dead, there’d be no way for me to protect you. Thanks for that, Osama. You’re a peach.
The night of May first, your father and I went to bed early to watch a TiVo’d episode of Friday Night Lights. When it was over, I flipped to CNN, because we always fall asleep listening to the parade of horribles the media drags out every day. It took me a second to realize what I was seeing. At the bottom of the screen, the bright yellow Breaking News banner: OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD.
I’m not going to lie, I’m glad that he’s dead. If ever a person deserved killing, that person was Osama bin Laden. But there was something troubling to me about the raucous crowd outside the White House chanting “USA! USA!” Equally disturbing were the thousands of college kids at Penn State waving American flags and singing Born in the USA, oblivious to the meaning of the song’s lyrics, the very portrait of youthful irony. I’d seen crowds like that on television before, but they were cheering for the other side, waving flags with a crescent moon and star, jubilant over the death of our people, our soldiers, our fellow Americans. And here we were, behaving just like them.
It bears repeating: that Osama bin Laden will never plot to kill another person is a good thing. He was a murderous psychopath and he needed to die. But measures of sobriety, decorum and humanity are all called for. These are what separate us from the radicals trying to kill us.
I hope that by the time you read this, terrorism is a problem of the past. But if it isn’t, I hope that your father and I have taught you not to fight hatred with more hatred, not to gloat when your enemies fail, not to sink to the level of people who have already sunken so far themselves.
“I said you need to strive to be better than everyone else. I didn’t say you needed to be better than everyone else. But you gotta try. That’s what character is. It’s in the try.” – Coach Taylor, Friday Night Lights
Try hard.
Love,
Mom
Excellent post!
ReplyDeleteWell said!
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