9/11

What, then, was to be learned when the towers came down? That we were no longer an island in the sea, safe in our own defenses, isolated, "good." That in some way, intangible evil had indeed touched us—lifted us out of our innocence and left us lessened, our youth belatedly spent. We reeled in the dark as this apparition blasted our complacency. We sought to comfort each other, and longed to know the worst.

The world, it was noted then, changed overnight. Even before the questions of who and what began, the questions of how grasped our souls and began to change us, for we could not remain unchanged. How, in the past tense, meant what strange concatenation of evil had led up to this; how could we be shaken in so unexpected a way? How, in the future tense, meant how could we respond? For respond we would, and in all the bonding and reassuring and heroism and tears of that time, we remained torn by the knowledge that we would act, and that our actions would define us.

The first days were the hardest days, as we sat, unaccustomed, in the world's nurturing embrace, striving to become great of soul. The outpouring of love was real, and we appeared to chafe, no longer able to hold ourselves up by our own exertion. The power that is made perfect in weakness eluded us, and the power defined by bombs and dollars burst gasping from the embryonic mass. As we struck, the world recoiled, gradually withdrawing its love, then its support, then what little remained of its sympathy. Our actions, which did define us, were those that we could perform by rote, by comfortable habit, by flexing our atrophied but desperate muscles and flailing blindly.

I wish I could tell a different outcome to this story. Ten years down the road, I am haunted by unrealized possibilities. The present has become our prison, as is all too evident from the way our politics have ceased to function. The glue that held us together in the past is stretched beyond the bursting point, and the flailing continues, as our worn-out strength is unable even to hold up our own weight, while the once sympathetic world licks its wounds and regroups.

There will be a lot of empty words this week, and my guess is that the world will not much care. What it needed from us, expressed in that inchoate embrace of ten years past, is what we never tried to give in return. The new, creative thinking that once compassed our greatness has yet to appear, as we turn on ourselves and fail to lead the way out of crises as great as any faced in the last century, when our self-assurance matched our untested power.

I try not to despair. The courage and will to solve the environmental and economic crises that imperil the world are still here. I can read them in countless blog posts and comments, and hear them from friends and relatives throughout the country—even (or especially) here in central Texas. My horror this week is that the swagger and desperate grasping for self-assurance that are likely to compete for our attention on the 10th anniversary of that awful day will only serve to strengthen the process that has made us less bold, less visionary, less ourselves than we have ever been before.

May the God who is the source of all wisdom shine some light through this darkness and enable us to see. May the prayers of the intercessors, far from the seats of political power, be heard and turned to hard wisdom. May we all be moved to rediscover our core values, and give to the world what it still so desperately needs us to give.

Amen.

A People's History of the New Millennium

Like many of us born well back in the past century, I spent a great deal of my life knowing I would have an opportunity given to few in human history: that of living into a new millennium. Since we tend to endow round numbers with enormous symbolic significance, I did a lot of wondering about what things would be like once the magical year 2000 arrived. I am not the late Howard Zinn, nor do I possess even a fraction of his knowledge or passion. For the benefit of those younger than I, though, I am going to try to write an accurate account of the way I and many other people in America have experienced the past eleven and a half years. It has certainly not been what I or we expected, or hoped.

During this long decade I have moved into late middle age and have had my share of personal triumphs and setbacks. In this summer of 2011, though, I have been finding my sleep troubled by dire forebodings of things I never thought I would live to see, and have been following the news cycle in a state of numb disbelief. Events unfolding in the public realm seem to me to threaten our very survival as a society. How did we get here?

In the year 2000 we lived through the most extraordinary presidential election in American history. The result was, to say the least, disputed, but the candidate who clearly lost the popular vote nevertheless managed to seize power. He was aided in this coup by the fact that his brother controlled the pivotal state of Florida, but his success was sealed by the most extraordinary act of judicial activism I have ever witnessed. Instead of allowing the democratic process to continue, the partisan Supreme Court stopped the gears of democracy and arbitrarily anointed a winner.

This unelected president then proceeded to act with the arrogant self-confidence of a leader who believes he has received a ringing electoral mandate. Having inherited the soundest economy in living memory, he began his term with an array of tax cuts that virtually guaranteed huge deficits in the near future. The result was not the creation of more jobs or of a more robust economy. It was, rather, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor that has now made the United States one of the most manifestly unequal countries on earth.

A devastating and unparalleled attack on our nation then led to one of the most misguided responses ever undertaken by a sovereign state. Letting the man responsible for the attack go free, our country proceeded to wage vicious war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11/01. We waged that war - which has turned out to be one of the longest in our history - entirely on credit. No attempt was made to raise money or to ask anybody outside of the military to sacrifice anything.

Meanwhile, the unelected president took advantage of the huge surge in his personal popularity that followed the disaster, not to further the common good, but to systematically dismantle the regulatory net painstakingly constructed since the Great Depression. Thus, he made it inevitable that we would see a repeat of that experience. When the catastrophe struck late in his second term, the unelected president gamely proposed a huge "bailout" scheme that would save those most responsible for it from any adverse personal or financial effects. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor reached epic proportions, and a huge group of permanently unemployed citizens solidified into a permanent underclass. The national debt, brought on by the enormous tax cuts and the two wars, reached unimaginable proportions.

The successor to the unelected president accomplished extraordinary things during his first two years in office, including what I believe to be the most important achievement by the US government in nearly 50 years. If that achievement is allowed to reach fruition, we will no longer be the only advanced country on earth that does not provide health care for all its citizens. A huge blot of shame will have been removed from our national conscience.

It is not humanly possible, though, to undo eight years of damage in a mere two. Since we elect our Congress every two years and have short memories, 2010 saw the party responsible for the damage swept back into power in Congress. It is at this point that events went from bizarre to surreal. The huge national debt brought on by the unelected president and his policies was now blamed on his successor and his party. More tax cuts were proposed, even though the wealthy corporations who had benefited from the last round were still sitting on huge chunks of uninvested capital. Drastic cuts in social programs were demanded: cuts so severe as to virtually guarantee that the permanent underclass we have created will live out their lives in abject degradation. Any attempt to stimulate the economy or create jobs was simply abandoned, in the hopes that the national economy could lift itself up by its own bootstraps: something that the history of the past century had clearly shown to be impossible. The one course of action that could actually solve the crisis - raising taxes, even on the obscenely wealthy - was rejected a priori.

It is at this point that the current Congressional temper tantrum over the national debt ceiling began its chilling, devastating course. The party in charge of Congress seems actually willing to default on the nation's debt - not the hypothetical future debt, but the debt that we have already incurred - in order to bully the president into beginning to dismantle a century's worth of social progress. The realization that this could actually happen is what has been keeping me awake at nights, gripped by foreboding. As someone who grew up to love this country and what it represents, I very much fear that I am witnessing its death throes.

This has been the most heartfelt post I have written in a long time, but it is the honest, unadorned truth. Barely over a decade in, this is how I see the events of the new millennium. As this long, hot summer of 2011 drags on, I am watching my country progressively lose its sanity and its soul.

While I am currently disgusted with the government, though, I still think there's a chance the American people are better than this. If we can remember that this illustrious nation consists of individuals, bound together in community, and that we do more than serve the giant corporations and the billionaires who run them, there may still be hope. I am on the lookout for signs that there are still others who believe this as well.