September 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Breaking Down the Walls

David Potorti is Co-Director of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows (www.peacefultomorrows.org)

After the brutality and shock of the September 11 attacks, how have family members of the dead managed to find reconciliation? It's a good question, one that suggests a long, searching journey, some arm-wrestling with the devil, and a successful ascent to a higher spiritual plane. For members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, however, the answer is less dramatic: reconciliation seems to have found us. It seems to have emerged from who we are with a minimum of coaxing.

I came to this conclusion when Peaceful Tomorrows member Rita Lasar, who--like me--lost her brother in the north tower of the World Trade Center, inquired, "were you ever angry at the people who did this?" I admitted that I hadn't been--both of us agreeing that anger is a useless emotion. Anger, after all, makes you do stupid things--like kicking the dog, driving too fast, or yelling at your kids. On September 11 it resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. And starting on October 7, it resulted in the deaths of thousands more.

Not that I haven't experienced a profound, and at times, debilitating, sadness over my brother's death. But that sadness, from the very beginning, has been linked to a larger sadness. A realization that no murder is ever justified. That no murder ever takes place in a vacuum. And that I didn't love my brother any more, or less, than anyone, anywhere, loves their brother--or their spouse, or their parents, or their kids.

While September 11, for most Americans, was a day when the walls went up, for me it was a day when the walls came down. It was a day when I realized that there were no walls high enough, no bombs big enough, no intelligence sophisticated enough to prolong the illusion of American exceptionalism. Our culture tells us that Americans don't get old, don't get hurt, and don't answer to anyone. That we are not accountable to international law, to the laws of economics, or to each other. These are lies. And the sooner we move beyond these lies, the safer we will be.

Then, hopefully, we will be willing to face up to the biggest lie of all: that terrorism is the problem. With apologies to George W. Bush, terrorism is not the problem. Terrorism is a symptom of the problem. On September 11, we were told that everything changed. All bets were off. Newsman Dan Rather remarked upon "the new face of terrorism." The idea that something is new gives us a multitude of excuses: We didn't see it coming. History is no guide. None of our tools work anymore.

But while Americans seem to need a "new, improved," label in order to sit up and take notice, the bad news is that we're facing the same old problems we've had all along: Extremism. Militarism. Racism. Poverty. Ignorance. Inequality. Hopelessness. Rage. We haven't fixed them. They haven't gone away. They're just announcing their presence in more desperate ways, in an increasingly-desperate attempt to get our attention.

Still, I wonder if we are paying attention. Do we understand the conditions in which most people on earth presently live? Do we understand the powerful role that America's choices--made willfully or ignorantly--are playing in creating those conditions? Do we understand that America is not a planet, but a partner sharing the rest of a globe?

I recently met a Pakistani-American who reported that when he was a child, Americans in his home country were treated with deference, respect, and a kind of awe. Today, he admitted, Americans garner none of that courtesy or respect. "They're just like everyone else," he said. It was our values--evidenced in our behavior--that used to be respected. Today--there, as well as at home--we claim freedom as our inheritance, and respect as our due. But freedom, like respect, needs to be earned. And Americans are not exempt from that responsibility.

There's a saying, "America will always do the right thing--having exhausted all other possibilities." Today, we are still in the process of exhausting all other possibilities. But I'm beginning to wonder if Americans have the courage or the will to do the right thing. A year after September 11, I'm distressed to learn that we seem to remain curiously unmoved and unchanged as a nation--that the deaths of my brother and some 3000 other Americans have served not as a call to self-examination and to the recognition of the value of all life, but as a call for more anger, more violence, and more deaths of innocent people identical in every way with our lost loved ones.

Refugee boy, Takhar Province, Afghanistan, Nov. 2001 © Doug Hostetter

"Are you guys serious about this crap????" goes one recent email addressed to Peaceful Tomorrows. "Are you honestly considering raising money to help Afghans??? I can guarantee you that no one in Afganistan is raising money for all of the families that were affected by 9/11. Why don't you use your efforts and raise money for them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am sick of all of you bleeding hearts trying to fix things over there.....LOOK IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I've looked in my own back yard. And what I see is a memorial stone for my brother Jim, who died at the World Trade Center. And what I've learned is that my family will never be safe until families "over there" are safe. That my children and their children have a shared destiny on this earth. That, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., every bomb we drop in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or anywhere, explodes in our own country--by robbing resources from the very things that make our lives worth living.

War is not the answer. We need to acknowledge that war is a blunt, extravagantly expensive, and wasteful solution to a particularly complex system of problems. Throwing more money at the military, or turning over more power to the Pentagon, does not change the limited nature of its mission or the limited outcome of its victories. The real work begins when the wars are over.

"I agree with King that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows," goes the argument of one Vietnam-era anti-war protestor who today supports the bombing of Afghanistan. "It would be a good world if bin Laden and all who hate like him thought this way, too. But they don't."

It's a common argument, but take it one step further and consider where it leaves us: it leaves us, in President Bush's words, with the terrorists. Because they are unwilling to subscribe to our principles, we must abandon ours and subscribe to theirs.

Principles, however, are like life preservers. Why have them hanging on the wall if you throw them away the minute you need them?

Last September, NPR "war correspondent" Scott Simon publicly identified himself as a Quaker just long enough to announce that "even pacifists must support this war." In a dissenting response, Janet Nagel, a member of the Durham, North Carolina Friends Meeting, quoted from a 1912 statement on Friends' Peace Testimony:

"We hold the moral law of gentleness and forgiveness and love to be unconditionally binding upon us now. It seems a poor and pitiful thing to believe in principles except when they may have to be applied, in forgiveness only when there is nothing to forgive, in love only for those who love us. It is our present sinning and stricken world that needs these redeeming messages in word and life. May we be faithful to the vision! It bears with it a grave but splendid responsibility."

If I have one hope, a year after the attacks of September 11, it is that all of us recognize our responsibilities: to our Constitution, to our country, to our children, and to each other.

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