September of 2021 has 2 notable anniversaries. The first one occurred on Saturday as we, with great sadness and perhaps some fear of the future, remember what happened 20 years ago on that date. The next anniversary will be discussed next week.
I still have vivid memories of how I found out and what my reactions were. Our two kids were in school. Both the wife and I taught but at different universities. I was at home grading papers while listening to an Art Tatum cd. I was scheduled to give those papers back and to give a quiz to an afternoon class. A student called me to ask if we were going to have our scheduled quiz since one of the Twin Towers was struck by an airplane.
My first reaction was to say that of course we are going to have a quiz. I said that because I could only picture a small plane flying into one of the Twin Towers. The TV reports quickly corrected my false assumption. I went to campus to find that classes had been cancelled. On the drive home, an electronic sign on the highways I was taking, a highway that led to NYC, stated that all entry points to NYC were closed.
When I got home, I watched more of the reports on the attacks on tv. It was a horrible time. Atrocities were committed against people here and many died a horrible senseless death because of the rage of some religious extremists.
I thought for sure that if we sent the military in there that they would get the job done. That is because in the first time in decades, our troops would be fighting and be put in harm's way in response to their own nation being attacked rather than for some foreign policy venture.
But something else was occurring. I was in the beginning stages of going through massive changes in my political views. For most of my life, I was typical political conservative. When I had voted, it was always for Republican candidates. I was relieved that Bush had beaten Gore in the 2000 election. But being moved by my best friend, I started to read non-conservative material. I started with reading a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Noam Chomsky along with reading some of Martin Luther King's Jr. writings. While Chomsky had a passion for fairness in that our nation should follow the rules standards that it imposes on others, Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated a passion for winning over others. I could not find any arguments against their thinking.
That change I was beginning to go through in the summer of 2001 partially colored how I saw the attacks. Added to the anger I felt for the atrocities committed against us, I knew that they occurred within a certain context. That though we were victims of heinous attacks, we were not necessarily innocent victims. That though the attacks on us were immoral and wrong, our policies contributed greatly to the motivation of our attackers to attack us. That like us, they too were enraged by attacks on their own people. But by their own people, these attackers were thinking outside the box of national borders. Later on, my reading revealed who their own people were. It included the Iraqi victims, with hundreds of thousands of them being children, who died from the combination of the infrastructure attacks from the first Persian Gulf War along with the following sanctions. Their own people also included Palestinians, including many civilians, who were killed by Israel's Occupation against the Palestinians.
Here we should note that our policies that led to far more deaths than the 9/11 attacks did are no justification for the 9/11 attacks. But our deadly policies provided the motivation for 19 men to become coldhearted vicious murderers.
Because of our authoritarian culture, we prefer to think in black-white terms. That means that for us to regard as victims, they have to be faultless while victimizers are seen as being evil only. And perhaps it is that kind of thinking that prevents many of us from seeing those civilians who suffer at the hands of our foreign policies as being victims. Why? It is because it is difficult to see such people as being totally innocent and nearly impossible for us to acknowledge our nation as being capable of doing any evil let alone only being evil. Perhaps that thinking causes some to conclude that those who try to understand that 9/11 attacks in the context of our foreign policies are only trying to justify the attacks. The world, however, is more complicated than what our logic allows for.
Certainly those who have died because of the military operations that we have either conducted or supported are victims as much as the victims of the 9/11 attacks continue to be. And that is the problem here. Those innocent victims are objects of opportunity by those directing the violence. Those innocent civilians are, in a sense, used as a moat that protects those who make our foreign policies or those who use terrorism to strike back.
Maybe as an American, I can say that the lives of Americans mean more to me than the lives of those who are victims of our foreign policies, but I cannot say that as a Christian despite my many faults. While some churches teach that we are Christians first and Americans second, I disagree. Yes, those who believe in Christ are Christians first, but I can't be partisan here. People, regardless of their nationality, are equally important because all are made in the image of God regardless of their nationality, race, ethnicity, ideologies, biological sex, gender identification, and so on. Not being an American should not make the life of any person less important than the life of an American.
Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a similar sentiment only he couched it in terms of sharing the Gospel. That the Gospel is meant for all people including their children regardless of where they are from or their ideologies.
Thus, my Christian beliefs do not tell me that I am a Christian first and an American second. Rather, I am a Christian first and then a person--a citizen of the world who is a fellow image bearer of God-- second. Then I could somewhere add to that that I am an American. Because of my Christian beliefs, supporting my nation right or wrong has been replaced by the belief that I want America to be neither the practitioner nor the victim of injustice.
It was black-white thinking that led George Bush to claim that we were attacked because of our freedoms. Here, Bush was telling us to believe that 19 people sacrificed themselves to commit mass murder and start a war because we could choose between cheering for the Red Sox or the yankees, or that we choose between eating a hamburger or fried chicken for lunch. Does that make sense?
According to Bush's thinking, our nation was truly a victim in that it was totally innocent while our new enemies were totally evil. But as evil as our attackers were, Bush's thinking is wrong. Just as we continue to remember those who died from 9/11, the 9/11 attackers were at least partially remembering their dead when they attacked us. Again, that does not justify the 9/11 attacks. But realizing the context of those attacks could help us to stave off some future attacks before they are even conceptionalized by demanding that our foreign policies be solely determined by what is just and merciful rather than on opportunistic utilitarianism or tribalism.
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