We’re a nation of people who love the drama around tragedy.
Grieving loved ones plant crosses at the site of fatal car wrecks; our cemeteries are national monuments; we drop flowers and weep at the sites where deranged people shoot others; we genuflect from platforms overlooking disaster sites; battlefields draw tourists; we observe anniversaries of tragedies and mark our calendars so we can do it all again next year.
Thursday marks the seventh anniversary of the despicable, cowardly, ignorant and evil act that still reverberates through our society; its aftermath threatens to swamp our ship of state. Since that fateful day we’ve gone to war on two fronts for which we borrow and spend $10 billion monthly; more Americans live in poverty; our infrastructure is crumbling; unemployment is rising and insecurity creeps up our backs like a spider under our shirt.
It all makes us want to curse those Saudi, Muslim, fanatical terrorists for bringing this upon us.
Now, slap yourself with a cold rag and realize it was not their horrible act that caused our ongoing malaise.
We are at this place not because of the 9/11 event, but because of how we responded to it. While the world surely ended for nearly 3,000 victims and changed forever their families, those hundreds of millions others of us glued to our television sets for days could have been unaffected, save for our sad empathy.
Instead, our guts wrenched and we choked on bile to realize how fragile are the pillars that support our lifestyle. In fear and fright we pulled the mantle of “victim” over our own shoulders and raced to war. We poured billions of dollars into anything that could be tagged with a “security” label instead of investing in people here and abroad in ways that would truly make us secure.
On 9/12 my 22-year-old son told me he was going to enlist. I asked why.
“To fight the people who did this to us,” he said.
“And who is that?” I asked.
We wear the victim mantle proudly still. We cry “Woe is me” and stop the world to inhale the intoxicating smoke of tragic memory yet again.
Every day in Israel Hezbollah terrorists lob rockets into villages. Jews bury the dead and move toward tomorrow. In the outstanding book Kite Runner, even the Muslim Baba admired the Jews for how they moved forward after every tragedy. In Afghanistan and Iraq car bombs kill dozens and the Muslim survivors move on.
If people in areas that suffer constant tragedies memorialized each like we “American Christians” do, their lives would grind to a halt. We are among the very few nations that have the luxury of reveling in self flagellating pity after a tragic event. First, they happen so seldom our psyches are still tender. Second, we can watch endless replays of it on television the next day because we don’t have to find food to feed our families. The rest of the world has to pull their boots back on and get after it.
The real power of a terrorist is not his power to take a life. It is the power we give them when we don the mantle of fear and let ourselves be terrified.
“You did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship,” Paul said in Romans 8:15.
“My Spirit remains among you. Do not fear.” Haggai 2:5