A Certain 11th It’s the people jumping out of the windows. All that Evil going on, a full menu of Bad and Badder, of Sad and Sadder, and it’s the images of these people-like objects falling that still sticks me, these years later. ______ __________ In every life, some rain must fall. Somewhere in my ancestral tree, somebody who, if not for them, no me, their moment was hearing that Genghis Khan’s army was only a week away, for another of my ancestors it was hearing the first about the Black Plague, or that the Vikings had just landed, or that Napoleon was rattling sabers again, or that Hitler had invaded Poland or that Japan had just sucker punched the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor… For me, it was the assassination of JFK. That’s my A moment; not the biggest, but the first Big moment. Later, in 1968, a year you’d have thought America was hell-in-a-hand-basket bound, we lost his brother, Robert and we lost Martin Luther King. The whole country seemed splintered and splattered, generation against generation, race against race, ideals against ideals. And back then, when I was younger, it all felt so much more urgent, but now, some decades under my belt, I realize that both people and peoples are resilient. People don’t fold, communities don’t fold, countries don’t fold, they dent, but they adapt to the dent. That’s in there, in us, built in. That’s why I’m not too big on the We’ll Never Forget themes. We do forget. We do heal. We do move on. We buck up. We yank on bootstraps. That’s who we are, from the moment we arrive in life, we’re intending to stay alive. But sometimes we’re in the wrong airplane or the wrong building and some sick-in-the-head religious nuts make us get dead, before our time. ________ _________ One of the shocks for us was that somebody out there hated America that bad. We don’t think we deserve to be hated. None of us is under any illusion that America isn’t doing some dirty things out there, usually just people chasing money and power, the oldest addictions on earth, but even with our misbehaving, we really think we’re the nicest, most civilized superpower that’s ever existed. Anybody want to trade us for Persia? Rome? British Empire? Didn’t think so. I often thought that America behaved like a child of wealth, all our parents and grandparents awakening to the new world after World War II and feeling a little guilty about how good we had it, a lot of wealth just falling in our laps, not because we were special but because of timing and circumstance, natural resources and the whole United Bigness of the USA. Like the little rich kid who just wants to fit in, who treats poorer school mates with candy and gum and shares their so-much-better toys, America was throwing money around, out of guilt it seemed, trying to be liked by all these countries that we’d passed by, by all these Third Worlders that would never make it to First Worlders. I resented our weakness, our neediness to be liked. I especially resented how those who begged from us despised us, even as they accepted our money. But attack us! Kill us! Women, children, civilians, the whole randomness of mass murder! _______ _______ Alan Jackson wrote a song about 9/11, kinda touchy-feely, about how watching 9/11 unfold on TV made you wanna go hug on your loved ones. I was more in the Toby Keith camp, ready to go stick a boot up somebody’s ass for the audacity to think there wouldn’t be Hell and a Half to pay for stirring up the ole U.S. of A. I was ready to do some nuking back then. These terrorists, they’d fallen from humans to roaches, and it was time to rid the planet. Can’t reason with ‘em, can’t cure ‘em, let’s just fry ‘em. Being a preacher’s kid, I’d had my eye on Islam for a while. Surely Islam had somebody who would equate with Christianity’s Pope, surely there was a Billy Graham type, and at the local level I just assumed that Islam’s pews were filled with people much like the people at my local church, regular folks, thinking they’ve got some truth and trying their best to live it. After 9/11 I remember writing something that I titled, Why Is Islam So Angry? Back then it was a suicide bomber du jour, like c’mon, when are you gonna run out of these nuts? Christianity ain’t short of nutheads either – snake handlers and parents who let their children die because they insist on God doing the healing – and I kid you not, I’ve known Christians who actually prayed for a parking spot at Wal-Mart (Lord help us), but even with the loose screws among the pews you’d be hard pressed to find more than a gullible thousand who’d be willing to buy into a lie, strap on a bomb and go kill strangers…and yet Islam seemed to have an endless supply! It all seemed so pathetic. Let me see if I got this straight: you’re going to go kill random strangers, even infants, because somebody told you that you’d rate being a martyr, and would instantly be welcomed into Paradise, the whole seventy virgin thing? Seriously? Your last act on earth is mass murder and your god thinks that’s AOK and Thumbs Up? C’mon. That god, I got no interest in him. That version of heaven: think I’ll pass. An eternity spent with car bombers and planes-into-towers pilots? Send me south. I remember thinking, ‘imagine how hard it must be to be a Muslim missionary!’ Who would convert? I’d known some Black American’s who’d joined Farrakhan’s bunch, and the main reason was, they considered Christianity a “white” religion, so they’d gone Islam, just because. Oh to see them on 9/12. _________ __________ I remember when George W. announced Homeland Security. Instantly, inside, I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ I got zip faith in anything beauracratic. Here Bush was, like leaders have been doing forever, faced with a problem, he was creating a solution, in this case a whole new department. Gonna save America. Make us all feel like we’re-doing-something, it’s all well intentioned, and I mean that, but it always turns out the same way, a bunch of mouths latched on to the government teat, and there to stay, till death do them part. Couple years ago, we’re having a Mardi Gras parade down the street in front of our building, not New York, just a little town too small to call a town, and not quite city enough to really feel that way, and guess what we had, some gazillion million Homeland Security vehicle with antennae and satellite dishes on the roof, parked out there in the Albertson’s parking lot, as if bin Laden was coming here. For crying out loud. That kind of stuff just makes me shake my head as I write the sentence. When we finally got bin Laden it was such a stunning let down. This man, this monster, he’d been hiding out in his little self imprisonment of a house, trapped there, relying on the crudest of communication, even watching CNN like the rest of us, for news of the world. We’d spent AllThatMoney to catch this little dried up shell of a man, this worthless waste-of-sperm of a human. ________ ________ All those people. Good, not-so-good, gonna get better, still got time, got letters to write and calls to make, apologies to say, forgiveness to be granted, plans for the weekend, can’t wait for Christmas… they’re all just you and me, the whole vegetable soup of humanity, and they awoke on September the 11th with not a thought about dying. Some never knew death was just a second away. Some were asleep on the first plane. Some were answering emails in the first tower, their back to the window. As going goes, I guess that’s a kind of kindness. For others, terror. Death is coming. I don’t understand it, I don’t deserve it, there’s just a few moments, and not enough of them… It’s those people who jumped out of the windows... When I think 9/11, I think first of them. What were you thinking? What did you do before you got to the ledge? Did you pray, did you write something and stick a letter in your pocket to be found upon your smash? I want to hug you before you jump. I want to say I’m sorry that’s it you. You didn’t earn this. I wish I could make you not feel lonely as you fall, all those stories... _____ ____________ There isn’t a lot of moral to the 9/11 story from the doing side. These guys, before they were flying death into buildings, they were celebrated at birth, just like all of us, lives filled with cakes and candles and toys, hugged by grandmothers, having their first infatuations and first kisses, and they end up there, dead inside before they were dead everywhere, and what’s to say about them? I don’t want to nuke them anymore. I feel such a neutral pity for them. Once they got themselves dead they were getting acquainted with the Father of their victims. I’ll take Him over nuking any day. There is a moral for the good guys. First: there’s more good guys than bad guys. That’s pretty nice to know. Some places in history where it seemed that the bad guys had the quantity to match the lack of quality. We absorb. That’s nothing new, but it’s never more obvious than after a national tragedy. We, the group, the all-of-us, we take the lick, and we keep on ticking. True for one, true for a family, true for a community, true for a nation, true for a globe. Good versus Evil – I’ll cede battles to evil, but I know who wins the war. ___________ _____________ This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, where we rest each evening not understanding the random power of evil, but sleeping by the grace of faith, that there is a He who sees not in life spans, but in eternal timelessness.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 02:23:22 +0000
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