A
Bright September Morning
By
William Rivers Pitt
t
r u t h o u t | Essay
September
11, 2002
"All
I have is a voice
To
undo the folded lie,
The
romantic lie in the brain
Of
the sensual man-in-the-street
And
the lie of Authority
Whose
buildings grope the sky:
There
is no such thing as the State
And
no one exists alone;
Hunger
allows no choice
To
the citizen or the police;
We
must love one another or die."
-
W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"
The
sky above me today is as hard and bright and blue as it was one year ago.
The air carries that same hint of crisp autumn that lies in wait within
the yellow becomings on the green leaves shivering in the breeze outside
my window. It seems, somehow, utterly terrifying that the weather today
is a mirror image of what it was a year ago. I might not be so afraid if
it were cloudy and raining. Bad things happen on sunny days. This is one
of the superstitions that has taken root inside me over the last twelve
months.
Sometimes
the world can turn inward on its axis. Nothing seems to change - the surfaces
remain as familiar as the pattern of veins that sit close to the skin of
your right hand. Yet that inward turn looses a wind as ferocious as the
growling throat of a hurricane. You may batten down your home as best you
can, but that wind will come and tear all that you love and cherish up
from the foundations and fling it, shattered and bent, far beyond sight.
The
world turned inward on its axis one year ago today. With the exception
of the smoldering ruins in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, everything
remained the same on the surface. The attacks were pointed, aimed with
brutal accuracy at symbols of our might. Beyond the charnel houses those
targets became, the nation was unmarked in any physical sense. The wind
blowing from that inward turn was a psychic one, howling in our minds and
souls. The only indication of damage to be found beyond the targets rested
uneasily in the anguished, furious, terrified eyes of your neighbor and
your spouse and the face that stared back at you from your bathroom mirror.
A
week after the attacks, I found myself playing a game as I waited for the
bus to work on the heavily-traveled street by my house. I called the game,
"Count The Flags." I stood there and tallied how many American flags I
saw on car bumpers, windows and radio antennas. My wait for the bus lasted
less than ten minutes, but I managed to count 163 flags before I was finished.
This
we called "Unity," and there was strength in that. America had been attacked,
and the citizenry roused itself to display the colors on every flat surface
and pole available. It reminded us of the police officers, firefighters
and rescue personnel whose unbelievable bravery - they ran between falling
chunks of building and human bodies, ran up stairs choked with fleeing
survivors, ran without pause into their own deaths, because it was their
duty - made us all humble and awed and proud to be Americans. Shirts and
hats bearing the FDNY or NYPD symbols could be seen on every street and
in every town.
Two
days after the attack, I summoned the strength to go out for the evening.
This was no small thing; the shock of it all was nowhere near over, and
everyone was bracing for the other shoe to drop. Some friends and I went
to the House of Blues in Harvard Square to see a jam band named Umphrees
McGee play. Before the show started, the building's fire alarm began to
bray, and the effect was dynamic; Once upon a time, a fire alarm was an
annoyance to be ignored until the flames reached your table, but on this
night everyone was up and out in thirty seconds.
When
the fire trucks arrived and the firemen clambered down, all of us in the
street roared and cheered and clapped for them. When one of them mentioned
that their whole crew was leaving the next day to help with the cleanup
in New York, there were more cheers and even some weeping. Several people
embraced the firemen before they pulled off into the night. That's how
it was a year ago, and for the most part, that's how it still is. You don't
forget the kind of heroism we saw on that terrible day. True heroes are
hard to come by.
You
can still see those flags today. They are weatherbeaten and torn, frayed
and tattered. Sometimes you'll find one in the gutter on the side of the
road. There are two metaphors to be seen in this. The first describes an
America that was attacked and wounded, but still stands strong and proud
and free despite the damage done. The second describes an America falling
to pieces in the wind of that axial turn, murdered by inches. The latter,
sadly, seems far more appropriate.
In
the aftermath of the attacks, George W. Bush told us that the blow had
been struck by evil men who hated our freedoms. We were told that the perpetrators
would be captured dead or alive. Our cause, we were informed, was a crusade.
The nation became familiar with the names Osama bin Laden, Taliban, and
al Qaeda. We all quickly reminded ourselves where Afghanistan was on the
map.
As
all of this unfolded, Muslim Americans were beaten and murdered in the
streets, their stores vandalized, their places of worship desecrated. Christian
leaders laid the blame for the terrorist attacks upon feminists, gays and
the ACLU. The rest of us hunkered down and waited for daylight, anticipating
the siege but not sure if the walls would hold. They had, after all, so
thoroughly failed us on that bright September morning.
The
months that have passed whisper a tale almost too bleak to be repeated.
The Attorney General stood before Congress to defend the incredible revisions
he shepherded into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and claimed
that anyone who questioned these actions was either aiding terrorism or
was a terrorist themselves. Today, Federal authorities can arrest and detain
you without the benefit of a lawyer or a trial if they decide you may be
supporting terrorism. These authorities can also enter and search your
home, tap your telephone and computer, all without a warrant or notification
if they suspect you of supporting terrorism. By Ashcroft's definition,
supporting terrorism means questioning the reasons for annihilating two
hundred years worth of constitutional protections.
Here
is the tally: Government may now monitor religious and political institutions
without suspecting criminal activity, thus abrogating our freedom of association.
Government has closed immigration hearings, holds people without charge,
and resists public records requests, thus abrogating our freedom of information.
Government has levied veiled and not so veiled threats ("Watch what we
say." - Ari Fleischer), and has accused many who criticize the administration
of treason, thus abrogating our freedom of speech. Government may monitor
conversations between inmate and counsel, and may in many cases deny access
to counsel, thus abrogating the right to legal representation. Government
may hold people without trial, and deny them the right to face their accusers,
thus abrogating the rights to liberty and a speedy trial. This list goes
on and on.
The
war in Afghanistan has left more innocents dead than the attacks upon New
York and Washington combined. That body count has become so extreme that
the rank and file in Afghanistan, once grateful for the destruction of
the Taliban, has begun to turn upon us in fury. The Taliban regime was
shattered, and al Qaeda was scattered, but Osama bin Laden and the henchmen
who aided him are still at large. In seven months, between September 2001
and March 2002, bin Laden went from Public Enemy No. 1 to a man of such
paltry significance that the Bush administration almost completely refused
to speak of him in public. The mastermind remains alive and free while
hundreds of Afghans rot in detention centers, uncharged and without trial.
Americans,
in the days between then and now, have been introduced to a new kind of
terrorism. The names Enron, Harken, Arthur Andersen, Halliburton and WorldCom
became familiar in every household that had a retirement stake in the market.
These entities dropped massive bombs on Wall Street, burning profit reports
and accounting balance sheets into worthless ash, ruining with their shameless
criminality the dreams of millions of Americans. We have only begun to
reap the whirlwind spun by these white-collar McVeighs.
We
don't hear much about them these days, though. The word on everyone's lips
now is Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. We are preparing to attack, unilaterally and pre-emptively,
another nation. No proof has been offered that Iraq poses a threat to this
country. No proof has been offered to tie Iraq to the September attacks.
NATO, the European Union and the entire Arab world stand vehemently against
any attack. If we go in there with no UN mandate and against the will of
the world, we will create the very battle - Islam vs. the West - that Osama
bin Laden was hoping for. We will guarantee another day of mega-terrorism
on our shores. Along the way we will kill tens of thousands more innocent
civilians, and lose many American soldiers.
Someone
once said that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back, and
it is there that you discover your nature. We have stared into the abyss
in the last year, and have found our nature damning. Covert American dalliances
in Afghanistan created, funded and trained the groups that became the Taliban
and al Qaeda, starting in 1978 with Zbignew Brzyzinski's "Afghan trap"
that drew the USSR into invasion. The decisions of that time birthed Osama
bin Laden. Covert American dalliances with Iraq birthed Saddam Hussein,
whom we armed and funded during the Reagan administration despite his use
of chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran. We made fast friends
during the Cold War, and turned on them even faster. That they have turned
on us has spawned our common woe.
There
once was a dream called America, and it was beautiful indeed. It spoke
loudly of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The dream was never
fully realized, but the promise implicit in its creation swore that, some
day, every day, we would stride in strength towards that more perfect union.
So long as one living person holds that dream in their heart, it will never
die. Even the horrors of the year we have passed are not strong enough
to destroy that dream, and no force from beyond our borders could ever
hope to end it. The dream has no borders. It lives in the soul.
The
only ones capable of destroying the dream called America are those who
live within its warm embrace, those who are motivated by greed and power
to act in ways guaranteed to bring fire and ruin down upon us all. The
only ones capable of destroying that dream are the citizens, the average
folk, who surrender their right to governance to those who value petroleum
and profit above life and liberty. The dream is not dead, not yet. But
we walk along the keen edge of a knife. One slip, and we shall fall. America
will remain, but the dream will be no more.
The
world sometimes turns inward on its axis. It can be turned again. Two hundred
and twenty six years of democracy cannot be undone in one year, unless
we the people let it happen. Another autumn is upon us, its hard blue skies
reminding us of everything we fear to speak of. As we remember the year
that has passed, a year that has brought so many wrenching changes, we
must remember the simple words of Mother Jones.
Remember
the dead. Fight like hell for the living.
-------
William
Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, 'The Greatest
Sedition is Silence,' will be published soon by Pluto Press.
