September 11th Reflections

Tomorrow, September 11th, 2006, marks the fifth anniversary of the horrific attacks on the Pentagon, on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and on America.

9/11/01 was a dark day in American history, one that will live in infamy. Though five full years have passed, the violent and fractured images of those long hours have been burned indelibly into our individual and collective psyches, and the memories of terror, of shock, and of sorrow remain permanently etched into our souls.

Just as previous generations were able to recall with absolute clarity where they were when they first heard the terrible news that John F. Kennedy Jr. had been assassinated, so too, for the rest of our lives, will millions and millions of both Americans and citizens of other countries use the tragic events of 9/11 to forever mark time.

The tragedy touched each one of us even if we did not personally know someone who died, was maimed, or who suffered - and many of us did. Even though five full years have passed, each one of us continues to live with the terror of that day.

And yet we do continue to live. Not just survive but continue to live.

And "there's the rub," for how must we continue to live in order to do justice to those who have suffered the untold agonies of terror?

We can mourn, which we have and will. We can wreak vengeance, which we have and will. We can vow that this will never happen again.

Ultimately however, after our mourning, after our revenge, and after all our solemn vows, we humans are left to live with terror - a primal essence of fear and anxiety - that we who continue to survive must confront in order to continue to live.

The human essence, our ability to continue to live, is predicated upon how we confront terror, for terror has been, is, and always will be part of our lives.

We may smother it temporarily, eradicate it briefly, but terror always returns to the living. In improvised explosive devices and in mortar attacks, in sniper attacks and in strafings, in Holocausts and in Hurricanes ripping through levees and neighborhoods, terror proliferates and in doing so touches each one of us.

For every messiah preaching death, for every bomb dropped from 35,000 feet, for every politician's decision to play war, there are real consequences: sons maimed, grandparents displaced, daughters killed, mothers' children ripped untimely from their wombs, loving families rent asunder.

Each of these terrorist acts spawns hundreds of thousands of survivors, those of us who continue to live, those of us who have stories to tell about the consequences of terror.

It is in these stories that the antidote to terror can be found. For our stories of survival are the same stories that other survivors tell, the same stories that we and they pass on from one generation to the next.

The stories feature different lands, different gods, and different peoples, but in the similarity of these stories lies redemption. The similarity lies in how we all survive terror and how we all continue to live.

We may never rid ourselves or our world of terror but by recognizing that terror is terror regardless of how it is caused or inflicted, we recognize our common humanity. It is that recognition that is essential to us continuing to share this world, to live together.

So that those who lost their lives and those who have survived will not have suffered in vain, we need to continue to live. And we need to ensure that others continue to live.

For only by living can we all confront the untold suffering caused by our terror.

--Steve McKibben
9/10/06