Remembering, Lest We Forget

ALL THE ATTENTION being paid the twentieth anniversary of nine eleven doubtless evokes poignant, painful memories for those old enough to remember, and a vague sense of longing and sadness, of having missed something profuondly important for those too young to remember, for anyone younger then twenty five. Those old enough to remember that horrible day, and old enough to remember JFK might agree that nine eleven ranks with the Kennedy assasination for shocking impact. The elderly might include Pearl Harbor. I can count myself among those with a direct direction to nine eleven and the twin towers, with a story to tell. I am not talking about the time when I bought a six pack in Times Square in 1975 and drank it while walking to Battery Park, my goal being to see the then new World Trade Center, drunk. I arrived just after sunest, and watched the red sky hover briefly over the Hudson. Nobody tried to stop or arrest me, it was as if I were a normal New Yorker or tourist, and I drained my last can, found a place to go, and plead innocent on account of having been nineteen years old, seeing New York for the first time. In the nineteen seventies, American drinking culture was freer, wilder, less serious. That same vacation I rode to the top of both the World trade Center and the Empire State Building, (both were still inexpensive to ascend, not like now), and I decided that I preferred the view from the Empire State building, with its location in the bosom of the big apple, with the magnificent skyline all around, just below.... My nine eleven story is more personal, and poignant. My sister was a high ranking civil servant who worked in the Pentagon. I enjoyed visiting her there in the days when you could just walk into the building, and walk casually around, unmolested. When our family heard the news on Sept 11, 2001, we were of course horrified and panic stricken. We spent half a day wondering, hoping and praying that she was alive and unhurt, with the telephone lines down. We were relieved to find out that she had left her Pentagon office and the bulding just moments before the crash. When I inquired as to her well being, she simply replied: "I'm fine, but I wish people would stop trying to kill me". Reasonable, altogether. Lost amind the horrible memories and the emotional commemoration of that horrible day is the difficult to accept but undeniable fact that the men, (Saudi Arabians mostly) who committed that horrible atrocity, the murderous evil bastards who carried out that heinnous crime, did in fact have a very valid and understandable complaint against the United States of America. In 1991 the United States occupied Saudi Arabian soil with a half million member army, for the purpose of removing Saddam Husseins's Iraqi army from Kuwait. The American army did the remmoval. The rest, as they say, is history. But here's the undeniable, irrefutable fact: When a superpower sends a half million member army into an Islamic country for the purpose of waging war against another Islamic country, no matter with whose permission or why, there are going to be some folks, most probably Islamic people, in this case Saudi citizens, who are going to be very, very angry about it. I for one would not want a huge foreign army on American sol, for any reason at all, even with the pemission of the American government. That does not justify a violent response: a sternly worded well written letter of disapproval, rather than the senseless murder of innocent people, would have sufficed quite nicely. But if the human species is ever going to evolve to a higher level, to a level beyond the use of violence, it is going to have to evolve mentally and emotionally, and a good place to start is by becoming willing to use reason to determine and accpet the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient or unpalatable to accept. We are far, as a species, from reaching that level. At our currrent level, we hate truth, and we bend over backwards to avoid it when accepting it is emotionally painful. Or, as Goethe said: "We dislike truth only because we fear that we would perish if we accepted it." No truer words were ever spoken.