After 9-11, We All Have New Battles to Fight

Wednesday, as we awakened and confirmed that no, it wasn't all just a bad dream -- that the World Trade Center and the west side of the Pentagon are as destroyed as they were on Tuesday -- one thing became utterly clear. For those of us who want a better, more just world, the terrain on which our effort must be fought has shifted dramatically with one bold act. We have an enormous amount of work to do, and a lot of work that needs to be done right now, today, immediately, before the United States government, with or without its allies, undertakes retaliatory measures that make a bad situation much, much worse.

Tuesday night, I attended two events. First was a peace rally attended by a couple of hundred people. To "warm up" the crowd, a guitar-playing duo sung a half-hour of cringe-inducing traditional peace songs: "Give Peace a Chance," "Kumbaya," "We Shall Overcome." The intentions were good, but the effect was jarring, and probably offensive to many people who heard it on TV. In the first 24 hours after the attack, Americans veered dangerously between shock, grief, and rage. It was a time to urge calm, but not a time to imply, to those who felt a desire to see our military flatten something, that their impulses were bad. Misguided, yes, but at some level, an emotion almost everyone felt. It was a time when doves and hawks alike needed to come together and recognize our common sorrow and fear and anger.

Later, I went to an enormous interfaith service. In terms of trying to "convince" Americans that more bloodshed won't help, this was actually a far more effective event -- calming, community-building, invoking the things all of us felt, including frailty. Even for people who don't recognize some form of a Higher Power, there are simply days when you have to ackknowledge that some things are completely beyond our control, personally or as a society. Tuesday was one of those days.

It's a lesson the United States desperately needs to learn every day. Unlike every other country in the world (with the possible exception of China), residents of the U.S. are not only oblivious to the rest of the world, but they can afford to be. There's no threat of invasion -- no history of it in nearly 200 years -- and not since OPEC in the early '70s has anyone reminded us that the rest of the world can intentionally hurt the U.S. economy badly. We have felt far too self-sufficient, and too free to ignore the atrocities done in our name elsewhere.

The broadest goal today of progressives is one that transcends any ideology: we, all of us, as individuals, must become aware and participating citizens of the world, not just the U.S. We have to pay attention beyond our flimsy borders, and we must demand that the U.S. treat others as we would have them treat us. Because no matter who was behind the attacks, it's certain that they felt they were treating us as we have treated others.

And in countless cases, that is correct. The same emotions of shock, terror, grief, rage, and powerlessness that many of us felt yesterday have been felt before by the ordinary people in Belgrade, Dili, Mogadishu, Baghdad, Panama City, Beirut, and many other places where the craters take the form of American footprints. They know the world is a small place. So must we all.

Beyond that, however, we have some very immediate and urgent concerns: peace, bigotry, media, civil liberties, and the attacks' effect upon global and domestic issues. In order:

1) Retaliation is unavoidable. The steadily escalating rhetoric of George Bush and his administration over the last few days has, most recently, advanced to calling the attacks an "act of war" (rather than terrorism); pledging to strike back not just at the perpetrators, but the countries where they live; and all but stating that they would not be bound by the norms of international law or justice in doing so (in Colin Powell's words, they will strike back, "legally or not.") We've must do whatever we can to beseech our government and its allies not to respond to the taking of innocent lives by taking still more innocent lives.