September 11, 2006
9/12
If “to ignore” means to refuse to take notice, then “ignorance” suggests a more or less continuing state of not-taking-notice. With that in mind, are we not curious ever that there just might have been some other way we could honor the 9/11 dead than by simply ignoring them?
Of course we’ve not ignored them. Our grief will take generations to run its course. It’s not the personal pain and anguish of 9/11, but the profound and singular opportunity of 9/12 in which we seem to be suspended as a nation by not taking notice. Those two dates are now metaphors seared into our national psyche, the one of the horror that was done to us and whose transgression continues down through time, the other, the horror that we’ve done to ourselves by not taking notice and whose transgression could well far exceed the effect and the memory of the other.
Oh, it didn’t look that way on 9/12, the date. It seemed momentarily like those deaths, both of the innocent and of the guilty might be a uniquely fecund source of an eventual reconciliation for the lot of us on this planet. We received more than just an outpouring of sympathy from our fellows, as profound as it was. We were offered a compelling identity, a one-of-a-kind opportunity to realize across and within all the gratuitous differences and barriers we’ve devised and, indeed, relished. We were offered uniquely the chance finally to know who we are as children of the created order and stewards of its mysteries, the very opposite of ignorance. It seemed as if suddenly there might be true joy in the midst of sorrow, and that we might finally embrace our calling of which the truth of the collective Myth of the Eden tells us.
It didn’t turn out that way. Indeed, from what we know now, it was already planned to be otherwise; 9/11 only triggered the urgency and, forbid the thought, the opportunity of what was at the very time in the minds and wills of our leaders. Far from our Founders’ humble acceptance of who we are, we were, instead colored and deformed by the zeal for vengeance resulting in the additional and continuing death of far more thousands in 9/12 than ever in 9/11, our own special brand of suicide bombing.
Murder and ignorance is such a strange way to honor the dead. Yet, even this, beginning at 9/12, is not beyond God’s grace and forgiveness. It only extends the distance by what may seem to our limited vision, an inconceivably immeasurable span.