September 11, 2014
Thirteen years ago today I disintegrated in a way that surprised me and some other people. Even today I am reluctant to tell what happened (to the extent I even know), not because I am ashamed but because anything I suffered is trivial compared to the experience of those who had loved ones in the World Trade Center. I mention it only because of the ways that all of life is connected, and every piece is a part of how we understand the world and any wisdom we have for living.
Until that day I believed that I had escaped from years and years of war with minimal Post Traumatic Stress. I knew that my startle reflex was a little extreme and that I was learning very slowly to survive a fireworks display without embarrassing myself. (Let them wonder why I wipe tears when others are applauding. I can’t really explain it.)
On 9/11/01 I was thousands of miles from New York. I was not startled. I was not afraid. And I knew no one who was in one of those buildings. But for a while, I apparently exited the conscious world, crushed by a wave of grief, a grief not even personal, but a kind of despair for the world. What I understood and could not bear to understand was that all the sorrow of the Middle East had come here. No part of the world would escape. These were not words. If I had words, I don’t remember them.
Today I see that what I felt was prophetic. We have been at war ever since. Angry, hateful words preceded attacks. They spewed all over the internet. They came to me in emails from Christian friends. In the next step we killed thousands of people. (No, I forgot. First we terrorized them. We called that Shock and Awe.) We lost many young and brave men and women, fine people with good motives. And we created a debt that our grandchildren will have to pay. When we tired of it all, we elected a president who meant to be a peacemaker. Now enemies never conceived of have arisen. Yesterday he promised to destroy them.
Maybe smarter people than I can figure out how the irresistible political and religious movements of the Arab world, the mistakes of world leaders sixty or a hundred years ago and what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq have all fermented together to bring us to this miserable place.
Last night, just before I slept, I listened for a few minutes to an interview on CNN. I tuned in late, so I don’t know who the man was, just that he was a Middle Easterner. He said that not everyone out there who hates ISIS and is threatened by it would also be thrilled to have our help. In the past, he noted, our participation had encouraged more and more extreme enemies.
In my book there is a small segment entitled “Two Ways of Thinking.” I almost left it out because, in some ways, it is an interruption in the story. In this segment I shared what I had noticed about the way people think in small, helpless countries, in contrast to the way we think in big strong countries. It seems relevant today to what this man was trying to tell us. Maybe it is more witty than profound, but a man I know who has lived in other countries most of his life, wrote me that this one and a half pages was worth the price of the book.
I would love to know what you think—about my observations of little-country big-country mentality, about the discovery that my PTSD is not about fear but sorrow, about the world’s illness and what you would do if you were president. Better still, what would Jesus do?