This article has been chosen as a Making Sense of These Times
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Jon Ward is a friend of a good friend of mine. This is a brave call to tell the truth about our weakness, recognizing that it's the truth that lets us discover the love that is our deeper resource. "To accept our powerlessness seems to me an urgent task because it is precisely what strips us to our common humanity. It mocks our tribalism and dissolves our hubris."
-Suzanne-

September 16, 2001

Unsettled Dust
Jon Ward

Each of us feels the wounds of the past week. Yet none of us can grasp the shock of those who died suddenly, the torment of those who died slowly, or the bleak emptiness of those condemned to wear the manacles of grief. Even with a compassionate effort to place ourselves in their place, our imaginations cannot penetrate this suffering. We are powerless - powerless in our sympathy, powerless in our fear, powerless in our outrage.

I see this as one of the hard challenges we have been given: to stand face to face with what lies beyond explanation, or solution. Do we have the nobility and courage to acknowledge the absurd frailty of the human form? Do our leaders? What an astonishing image of impermanence: those twin cavities in the Manhattan skyline. In the absence of the massive, weighty structures of the World Trade Center, how can we trust the solidity of anything?

The lurch to jingoism is understandable. We look for something indestructible, and we clutch the idea of "America". Against the invisible monsters of the night, we wave a Star Spangled Banner. I don't think this is bad, but neither do I find it true to the experience. We have been brutally hurled onto a new journey. I would prefer to start from where we are: confronted with something that is simply beyond us.

There's a fear, of course, that such an outlook would immobilize us. "Life goes on," as they say, and there is a task to rebuild that requires our confidence and energy. Yes, but the momentum of life is not rhetorical. That, too, is actually beyond our control like the birth of a baby. Life goes on regardless, and the courage it requires is also the courage of honesty, of being present to our limitations.

There's perhaps another fear that any admission of weakness will give comfort to the enemy. If we speak our fragility, surely we'll bring more destruction down on our heads! Don't we rather need to parade the "resolve", "guts" and "determination" of which our leaders speak? - America the undefeated. I think this misunderstands the so-called enemy, or rather misunderstands that this enemy is beyond understanding. The evil unleashed on New York and Washington is quite oblivious to phrase-making. Its perpetrators, who place no value on human life, do not care what we feel one way or the other. Their agenda of destruction is impervious.

To accept our powerlessness seems to me an urgent task because it is precisely what strips us to our common humanity. It mocks our tribalism and dissolves our hubris. It makes us one with a baby in Israel, a teenager in Palestine, a fireman in New York, a shepherd's wife in Afghanistan. We have lived too easily with the unconscious illusion of power, vested in military force and economic hegemony. If we rush to restore this illusion, we will weaken ourselves further, spiritually and physically. It may seem the worst kind of concession, to actually embrace the implications of what took place. But I believe our only strength lies in candor: to know that we are defenseless, not merely before a terrorist, but before our human lot.

Just as there is a temptation to wave the flag, there is a complementary temptation to say: "America got what it deserved." On the face of it, this is not such a difficult case to make. For while America in the modern era has shown generosity and moral leadership, it has also demonstrated arrogance, greed and a callous disregard for human suffering, from the Far East to the Middle East. But let's be careful here, because the reification of America is just as misguided this way round. It is not "America" that was buried in a heap of burning rubble. It was people - janitors, secretaries, traders, waiters... It is not "America" that mourns them now. It is husbands, wives, children, parents, lovers, friends.

Perhaps another admission we need to make is that hatred's circle can never be squared - the equation of justice is insoluble. There's a principle of ricochet that bounces the bullet of retribution in all directions, whether that bullet is fired by a fanatic Islamist or an enraged military. Last night, a few miles from where I live, a Sikh gas station attendant was shot dead because his turban and long beard made him look a bit like Osama bin Laden. This little local tragedy points to the incongruity of vengeance. The damage is always "collateral", to borrow that chilling term. No matter how much the Palestinians or any other peoples have suffered and died, I see no justice in the barbaric events of September 11 - nor in any generalized violence which they could spawn. The call to "war" is not only dangerous, it's delusional. There was once a world in which the armies of right faced the armies of wrong, but that world has passed. We can no longer hide our humanity in uniform.

What I do hear, faint and distant, is a very difficult spiritual command: to glimpse the mirror in our enemy's eyes. It is difficult because this enemy, of all that we could imagine, seems the most remote from who we believe ourselves to be. We cannot even fathom the mindset that conceived such a crime. These are people who studied, calculated and planned in the midst of their intended victims, then paid with their lives for a momentary experience of absolute power. Still, I believe, the command stands. We need to look deeper within, to the concealed point where we too yearn for a control that disconnects us from the breath of life.

So what should we do? Of course there is a job, the surgical job, of identifying and disabling terrorist networks - so far as this is possible. And to enhance the security of our cities and skies - so far as this is possible. But if we are as candid as the occasional official spokesman, we see the limits of our capacities in both these tasks. Through the leverage of technology, a handful of people armed with box cutters can exterminate thousands. What wall would be high enough to ward off such a threat? The evil that manifested during this past week cannot be arrested, shot or bombed out of existence. It is dispersed, like a metastasized cancer, throughout the global body. It can be inflamed, no doubt, by careless policy. And whatever action our leaders take, they should remember the principle of ricochet: that the bullet will always fall somewhere to the side of where they aim, or come hurtling all the way back.

Beyond the minimal, commonsense actions available to our government, I believe we should prepare for courageous acts of peace. Power has failed us, and it will increasingly fail us. We must find the gall to live by a different resource. Let us call that resource "love" But then let's also be careful to realize we don't know much about it. For too long, we have confined love to the status of a domestic emotion, a sort of family pet, while we managed our public world on the principle of power. A different experience of love needs to appear, one that is both tougher and richer than anything we have allowed so far. When it shows up on the international stage, it will probably seem to us quite odd.

The shocking events of September 11, 2001, have placed us at a new beginning. My prayer is: let us be honest about our intentions, about our ignorance, and about our vulnerability.

Jon Ward jon@young-assoc.com