A Bright September
Morning
by William Rivers
Pitt
Dissident Voice
September 11, 2002
"All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die."
- W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"
The sky above me today is as hard and bright and blue as it
was one year ago. The air carries that same hint of crisp autumn that lies in
wait within the yellow becomings on the green leaves shivering in the breeze
outside my window. It seems, somehow, utterly terrifying that the weather today
is a mirror image of what it was a year ago. I might not be so afraid if it
were cloudy and raining. Bad things happen on sunny days. This is one of the
superstitions that has taken root inside me over the last twelve months.
Sometimes the world can turn inward on its axis. Nothing
seems to change - the surfaces remain as familiar as the pattern of veins that
sit close to the skin of your right hand. Yet that inward turn looses a wind as
ferocious as the growling throat of a hurricane. You may batten down your home
as best you can, but that wind will come and tear all that you love and cherish
up from the foundations and fling it, shattered and bent, far beyond sight.
The world turned inward on its axis one year ago today.
With the exception of the smoldering ruins in New York, Washington and
Pennsylvania, everything remained the same on the surface. The attacks were
pointed, aimed with brutal accuracy at symbols of our might. Beyond the charnel
houses those targets became, the nation was unmarked in any physical sense. The
wind blowing from that inward turn was a psychic one, howling in our minds and
souls. The only indication of damage to be found beyond the targets rested
uneasily in the anguished, furious, terrified eyes of your neighbor and your
spouse and the face that stared back at you from your bathroom mirror.
A week after the attacks, I found myself playing a game as
I waited for the bus to work on the heavily-traveled street by my house. I
called the game, "Count The Flags." I stood there and tallied how
many American flags I saw on car bumpers, windows and radio antennas. My wait
for the bus lasted less than ten minutes, but I managed to count 163 flags
before I was finished.
This we called "Unity," and there was strength in
that. America had been attacked, and the citizenry roused itself to display the
colors on every flat surface and pole available. It reminded us of the police
officers, firefighters and rescue personnel whose unbelievable bravery - they
ran between falling chunks of building and human bodies, ran up stairs choked
with fleeing survivors, ran without pause into their own deaths, because it was
their duty - made us all humble and awed and proud to be Americans. Shirts and
hats bearing the FDNY or NYPD symbols could be seen on every street and in
every town.
Two days after the attack, I summoned the strength to go
out for the evening. This was no small thing; the shock of it all was nowhere
near over, and everyone was bracing for the other shoe to drop. Some friends
and I went to the House of Blues in Harvard Square to see a jam band named
Umphrees McGee play. Before the show started, the building's fire alarm began
to bray, and the effect was dynamic; Once upon a time, a fire alarm was an
annoyance to be ignored until the flames reached your table, but on this night
everyone was up and out in thirty seconds.
When the fire trucks arrived and the firemen clambered
down, all of us in the street roared and cheered and clapped for them. When one
of them mentioned that their whole crew was leaving the next day to help with
the cleanup in New York, there were more cheers and even some weeping. Several
people embraced the firemen before they pulled off into the night. That's how
it was a year ago, and for the most part, that's how it still is. You don't
forget the kind of heroism we saw on that terrible day. True heroes are hard to
come by.
You can still see those flags today. They are weather
beaten and torn, frayed and tattered. Sometimes you'll find one in the gutter
on the side of the road. There are two metaphors to be seen in this. The first
describes an America that was attacked and wounded, but still stands strong and
proud and free despite the damage done. The second describes an America falling
to pieces in the wind of that axial turn, murdered by inches. The latter,
sadly, seems far more appropriate.
In the aftermath of the attacks, George W. Bush told us
that the blow had been struck by evil men who hated our freedoms. We were told
that the perpetrators would be captured dead or alive. Our cause, we were
informed, was a crusade. The nation became familiar with the names Osama bin
Laden, Taliban, and al Qaeda. We all quickly reminded ourselves where
Afghanistan was on the map.
As all of this unfolded, Muslim Americans were beaten and
murdered in the streets, their stores vandalized, their places of worship
desecrated. Christian leaders laid the blame for the terrorist attacks upon
feminists, gays and the ACLU. The rest of us hunkered down and waited for
daylight, anticipating the siege but not sure if the walls would hold. They
had, after all, so thoroughly failed us on that bright September morning.
The months that have passed whisper a tale almost too bleak
to be repeated. The Attorney General stood before Congress to defend the
incredible revisions he shepherded into the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, and claimed that anyone who questioned these actions was either aiding
terrorism or was a terrorist themselves. Today, Federal authorities can arrest
and detain you without the benefit of a lawyer or a trial if they decide you
may be supporting terrorism. These authorities can also enter and search your
home, tap your telephone and computer, all without a warrant or notification if
they suspect you of supporting terrorism. By Ashcroft's definition, supporting terrorism
means questioning the reasons for annihilating two hundred years worth of
constitutional protections.
Here is the tally Government may now monitor religious and
political institutions without suspecting criminal activity, thus abrogating
our freedom of association. Government has closed immigration hearings, holds
people without charge, and resists public records requests, thus abrogating our
freedom of information. Government has levied veiled and not so veiled threats
("Watch what we say." - Ari Fleischer), and has accused many who
criticize the administration of treason, thus abrogating our freedom of speech.
Government may monitor conversations between inmate and counsel, and may in
many cases deny access to counsel, thus abrogating the right to legal
representation. Government may hold people without trial, and deny them the
right to face their accusers, thus abrogating the rights to liberty and a
speedy trial. This list goes on and on.
The war in Afghanistan has left more innocents dead than
the attacks upon New York and Washington combined. That body count has become
so extreme that the rank and file in Afghanistan, once grateful for the
destruction of the Taliban, has begun to turn upon us in fury. The Taliban
regime was shattered, and al Qaeda was scattered, but Osama bin Laden and the
henchmen who aided him are still at large. In seven months, between September
2001 and March 2002, bin Laden went from Public Enemy No. 1 to a man of such
paltry significance that the Bush administration almost completely refused to
speak of him in public. The mastermind remains alive and free while hundreds of
Afghans rot in detention centers, uncharged and without trial.
Americans, in the days between then and now, have been
introduced to a new kind of terrorism. The names Enron, Harken, Arthur
Andersen, Halliburton and WorldCom became familiar in every household that had
a retirement stake in the market. These entities dropped massive bombs on Wall
Street, burning profit reports and accounting balance sheets into worthless
ash, ruining with their shameless criminality the dreams of millions of
Americans. We have only begun to reap the whirlwind spun by these white-collar
McVeighs.
We don't hear much about them these days, though. The word
on everyone's lips now is Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. We are preparing to attack,
unilaterally and pre-emptively, another nation. No proof has been offered that
Iraq poses a threat to this country. No proof has been offered to tie Iraq to
the September attacks. NATO, the European Union and the entire Arab world stand
vehemently against any attack. If we go in there with no UN mandate and against
the will of the world, we will create the very battle - Islam vs. the West -
that Osama bin Laden was hoping for. We will guarantee another day of
mega-terrorism on our shores. Along the way we will kill tens of thousands more
innocent civilians, and lose many American soldiers.
Someone once said that when you stare into the abyss, the
abyss stares back, and it is there that you discover your nature. We have
stared into the abyss in the last year, and have found our nature damning.
Covert American dalliances in Afghanistan created, funded and trained the
groups that became the Taliban and al Qaeda, starting in 1978 with Zbignew
Brzezinski's "Afghan trap" that drew the USSR into invasion. The
decisions of that time birthed Osama bin Laden. Covert American dalliances with
Iraq birthed Saddam Hussein, whom we armed and funded during the Reagan
administration despite his use of chemical weapons on the battlefield against
Iran. We made fast friends during the Cold War, and turned on them even faster.
That they have turned on us has spawned our common woe.
There once was a dream called America, and it was beautiful
indeed. It spoke loudly of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The
dream was never fully realized, but the promise implicit in its creation swore
that, some day, every day, we would stride in strength towards that more
perfect union. So long as one living person holds that dream in their heart, it
will never die. Even the horrors of the year we have passed are not strong
enough to destroy that dream, and no force from beyond our borders could ever
hope to end it. The dream has no borders. It lives in the soul.
The only ones capable of destroying the dream called
America are those who live within its warm embrace, those who are motivated by
greed and power to act in ways guaranteed to bring fire and ruin down upon us
all. The only ones capable of destroying that dream are the citizens, the
average folk, who surrender their right to governance to those who value
petroleum and profit above life and liberty. The dream is not dead, not yet.
But we walk along the keen edge of a knife. One slip, and we shall fall.
America will remain, but the dream will be no more.
The world sometimes turns inward on its axis. It can be
turned again. Two hundred and twenty six years of democracy cannot be undone in
one year, unless we the people let it happen. Another autumn is upon us, its
hard blue skies reminding us of everything we fear to speak of. As we remember
the year that has passed, a year that has brought so many wrenching changes, we
must remember the simple words of Mother Jones.
Remember the dead. Fight like hell for the living.
William Rivers Pitt
is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, The Greatest Sedition is Silence,
will be published soon by Pluto Press.