The song at the other end of this link, There Are No Words, by Kitty Donohoe, won an Emmy Award in 2001. After five years I've managed to come up with some words, which you will find in this column, but I still think you should hear Kitty's song.
First published September 11, 2006
At 9:59 in the morning five years ago today, September 11, 2001, with a bright morning sun flooding through the window and a cup of coffee steaming on the table next to me, I sat and stared at the television, too stunned to breathe or blink. The south tower of the World Trade Center, along with the lives of many hundreds of people, had just disappeared into a cloud of gray smoke and dust.
My son, who was 19 years old at the time and had been watching on the television in his bedroom, came downstairs and asked me a question that still haunts me; "Dad, why would somebody do this?"
At 9:59 in the morning five years ago today, September 11, 2001, with a bright morning sun flooding through the window and a cup of coffee steaming on the table next to me, I sat and stared at the television, too stunned to breathe or blink. The south tower of the World Trade Center, along with the lives of many hundreds of people, had just disappeared into a cloud of gray smoke and dust.
My son, who was 19 years old at the time and had been watching on the television in his bedroom, came downstairs and asked me a question that still haunts me; "Dad, why would somebody do this?"
Watching ghostly dust-caked firefighters and policemen emerge from the gray cloud to catch their breath, to embrace each other, and possibly to ask themselves that same question, I struggled to find an answer. As they put their respirators back on, shrugged their oxygen tanks higher on their shoulders, and headed back down the street, all I could say was, "I really don't know Son. But I can tell you that you are looking at the bravest human beings you are likely to see in this lifetime."
A few minutes later, with the collapse of the second tower, many of those heroes were gone as well.
Over the next few days we watched politicians strut and posture and stage photo-ops standing on top of the smoldering ruins at what we came to call "Ground Zero." In the rubble beneath those photo ops we saw rescue workers who had survived the initial catastrophe digging frantically in an attempt to save friends and colleagues and office workers and janitors and anyone else who might still be alive.
Over the next few weeks we saw them digging much more slowly and somberly, working side-by-side with volunteers from all over the country.
Over and over again we heard the attackers called "madmen" and "cowards" and "haters of freedom." We saw images of women and men weeping in the streets near Ground Zero, posting photographs of loved ones who had gone to work September 11, 2001 and never returned. We saw images of young Arabs, apparently also haters of freedom, dancing in the streets of the West Bank, rejoicing in our pain.
Since September 11, 2001, self-described patriots in America have written speeches and slogans and songs about kicking butt and taking names and " ...getting 'em dead or alive." At the same time, self-described holy men in the Middle East have written endless messages praising the 911 attackers and suggesting that anyone not willing to follow these particular holy men should probably be killed.
Now as near as authorities have been able to determine, nearly 2,900 Americans died as the result of the attacks on September 11, 2001. And while that's not quite as many as the number of American kids who were killed with firearms that same year, it's enough to establish that day as one that few of us will ever forget.
Or forgive.
My religion teaches that vengeance is a bad thing, and that seeking retribution does me as much harm as it does to the object of the retribution. Still, I would love to see the people behind 911 face justice, and I can't personally think of a punishment suitably extreme for them. I guess all I can say is, I'm just too pissed off to be virtuous.
But then I find myself going back to my son's question five years ago; why would somebody do this?
I don't buy the "madmen" thing - you just can't get insane people that organized. And you might call people who die for their convictions deeply misguided, but you can't really call them "cowards." As for "haters of freedom," that just doesn't make sense to me. You can't hate freedom any more than you can hate breathing. No, these people aren't crazy, they aren't cowards, and they don't hate freedom.
They hate us.
I don't know what we should be doing about September 11, 2001. It doesn't seem to me as if the things we've been doing for the past five years have been working very well, but then I'm not a policeman, or a politician, or a statesman or a military strategist - I write jokes.
There is one thing I do know however, about hate: it's contagious.
Copyright © 2006, Michael Ball
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Comments: 18
~G. Limey
- mike
- mike
I can not change the past, so I choose not to hate. I'd rather pray for them all, Christian, Muslim, Jew, all others, radical and peaceful alike. I pray that they will all find peace and embrace it, leaving violence and violent thoughts behind. No one can stop me from doing that. I won't allow it.
- mike
Dietmar, I understand what you're saying, but I think you may be at least partly on tricky ground - "reasonable and cognative" are relative terms. Clearly their mental processes are different from what we understand to be reasonable.
The problem is that if you dismiss people like this as "crazy" or "evil," regardless of how truly deranged or awful they are by our standards, you tend to dimish the fact that there is a cause underlying this mindset, and so will have difficulty grasping that for every one you kill, two or four or eight more will spring up.
I am by no means excusing these monstrous actions, or the monsters that perpetrate them. But it does seem like declaring war on terrorists, no matter how emotionally gratifying that mey be, may not be a real answer to the problem.
And that's what it is all about - not the actual or tactical significance of the strike, but the sheer terror you can induce.
- mike
I really appreciate your thoughts and your willingness to share them with the world through gather.com
That is not how America became a role model for the rest of the world - an honor that we may, sadly, have lost.
Leah, you're entirely welcome. The picture says it all.
- mike
whenever i see anne coulter swinging her hair and spouting vitriol across the airwaves it makes me sick. it's one thing to believe you're right but it's completely another to insist everyone else believe it, too.
Religious fundamentalism mixed with political power has taken a grim toll on humanity for many, many years, from the torture and slaughter of the Inquisition wrought by my own Catholic church to the Taliban.
This is one reason our founding fathers wisely insisted on keeping religion and government separate. They had seen first-hand the abuses and carnage always seem to accompany any state religion.
As for Miss Coulter and her Fox News cronies, it's kind of hard to get wrapped around the idea that any of them actually believe the absurd things they say. I've always seen them as a sort of self-parody.
Unfortunately, there are now a fair number of people who have convinced themselves that their words bear some relationship with reality (remember hate being contageous?), and that is frightening.
- mike
I see them on many occasions here, hating everything that they think not following their belief. They can not drink alcohol, so they raids bars and pubs and stores selling alcoholic drinks. They can not eat pork, so they force the rules and regulations of serving porks in this country. They hate women, so they force them to cover themselves without their willingness. That kind of thing. Very difficult to understand them and very difficult to engage them in reasons, I think.
- mike