9/11 + 20

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an event now almost universally referred to by the numerical abbreviation “9/11.” It will be perhaps an especially poignant anniversary in this year which has witnessed the final, inglorious end of 20 years of war in Afghanistan, a war which was itself one of the first of many problematic responses to 9/11.

All of us who were alive then, especially those of us who were in Manhattan, have our own uniquely personal memories of that horrendous day. I remember how Tuesday, September 11, 2001, began so beautifully. After Mass and breakfast, I walked to the local polling place to vote in the Primary election for Mayor. On the way back, I looked up at a perfectly blue, cloudless, late summer sky and observed to one of my colleagues that, on such a day, I should get out and spend some time in Central Park. (It seems almost everyone remembers what a beautiful blue sky it was that morning, the kind of visibility that pilots call "severe clear.") But then, when I got to my office, my fellow parish associate startled me with the news of an accident (as it was initially then thought to be) at the World Trade Center. I went back to the rectory to turn on the TV to catch the news, and then “in real time” (as we now say) watched the buildings collapse - watching, with ever escalating horror and anxiety as (to use yet another cliché of that day) everything changed.

Soon even the corner Starbucks shut down, as police barricades went up, closing our street to regular traffic. For days we went around almost in a daze, staring at the vacant place in the skyline, as military jets patrolled the now grimly gray, but otherwise empty sky. We watched over and over again as TV told and retold the story, punctuated by occasional accounts of heroic courage and poignantly loving final conversations – powerful lessons not just about how to face death, but how to live a life that makes sense.

And then we mourned. For weeks, we were a city of funerals. That Friday of national mourning, our parish community, amplified by a capacity crowd, mourned as part of one united nation. A few days later, our church was filled again, this time in mourning for a much loved member of the parish choir, who had perished in the heroic struggle to recapture United Flight 93.

Walking around the city during those days that stretched into weeks, past churches and firehouses draped in mourning black, past posted pictures of missing persons who would never be found, I pondered what Abraham Lincoln famously called “the mystic chords of memory” that bind strangers to one another as fellow citizens of the same nation.

Twenty years have now passed. The brief flourish of national unity and shared purpose that followed that attack has long since dissipated into division and partisan rancor. It was a unique opportunity for unity which we, both leaders and citizens, have since collectively fumbled, as we have embraced out separate corners and taken sides in our contemporary tribal warfare (commonly called "culture war politics"). The result of our polarization has been to make real politics practically impossible, even impeding our making common cause as a country against covid-19, which accordingly continues killing so many, so unnecessarily.

In a threatening and insecure world of warring nations and clashing civilizations, 9/11 reminded us, once again and ever so seriously, lessons that we have apparently chosen as a nation not to learn - that the benefits of human society and civilized life do not come free or cheap, and that the challenging moral and political imperatives of being an authentic political community, as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, cannot be met by going shopping but demand our attention and intelligent engagement with one another. 

On the evening of September 11, President Bush addressed the nation and said: "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot shake the foundation of America." But the tragic reality is that they did. They did shake the foundations of America in multiple ways, at home and abroad.

 

Indeed, as if the tragedy of 9/11 itself weren't enough, that terrible event quickly set the stage for our collective national transformation into a fearful, security-obsessed state, even to the extreme of distorting the architecture of our buildings and our once public streets. Our post-9/11 mindset has contributed to the militarization of domestic policing - with catastrophic consequences that continue to poison police-community relations.  As part of the new civil religion of anti-terrorism, our entire nation adopted new rituals (like removing one's shoes at airports), while becoming increasingly obsessed with doing what John Quincy Adams in 1821 so wisely warned us against doing - going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." 

Well, the world abounds in monsters, but the destruction has not all been in one direction.

As if mistaken military interventions weren't problematic enough, the even more mistaken notion that managing the consequences of such interventions would be simple and easy instead made everything worse, and ultimately undermined whatever of worth was accomplished by such interventions. In the end, the monsters were anything but destroyed.

Meanwhile, as I did when preaching on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I find myself drawn again to recall the familiar words of the Greek tragedian Aeschylus (Agamemnon, II), which Robert Kennedy famously quoted in Indianapolis on the occasion of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., words now written on Kennedy's gravestone: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God."