A Call to Open Arms

The shock of what happened this morning at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, has not yet worn off, and the calls for revenge have not yet begun sounding across our land--but they will. Although we do not know, at the time of this writing, who brought about this massacre-by-airliner, it is likely, given the habits and proclamations of the terrorist groups that live and work among us, that Middle Eastern radicals did it, and that Osama bin Laden, one of whose operatives was to be sentenced in Manhattan the day after the attacks, either planned or paid for the action.

There are not many out there who could slip suicide hijackers onto three, possibly four, airliners, all of which had to be in the air before the first one crashed, and who would have timed the attacks to kill the most people possible, and create the profoundest horror in the onlookers, which is all of us. My teenage son called me early this morning, his voice shaking with emotion; my girlfriend phoned me later, describing the scene on her television set as she watched people wave from the upper windows of Tower Two while it collapsed beneath them, plunging them into a dark and final chaos of fire and pain…this word-of-mouth horror would be repeated person by person, heart by heart, over the whole country, over the world.

We Are All Human

And because we are all human, we must not heed them. Even if an Arab group did plan and execute this act, not every Arab is responsible. To harden our hearts against an entire culture because of this will make the radicals among them stronger; to engage in acts of discrimination, whether in policy or in private life, will be to nurture every seed of hatred against the West that Islamist propagandists have planted in the hearts of their fellows; we will be the gardeners of hate. They--and any totalitarian radicals--thrive on separation, on discrimination, on them-vs.-us, on demonization. When we make ourselves the enemy, we justify a war against us. And we will do so if we insult our Arab neighbors, if we close our borders, if we call for state terrorism to counter religious terrorism. We will make ourselves the enemy in an intimate and literal way, for we will become them: we will accept their attitudes and passions and strategies as our own, simply in mirror image. And they will have won.

If we call for martial law, they will have won. If we call for military revenge, they will have won. If we call for exclusionary laws, they will have won. If we call for economic sanctions, they will have won. And if we do not recognize our complicity in what has happened, they will have won, for we will have accepted their blindness as our own.

We Have Given Them the Causes and the Means

America holds six percent of the world's population and consumes twenty-five percent of its resources. That leaves the other 94% of the world to divvy up the three-quarters that remains.

They see environmental activists murdered in Nigeria so that we can drive; they see millions of women crouched over sewing machines in jungle shanties so that we can buy cheap shoes that we will throw away when they go back out of fashion in six months. They see our salesmen pushing Terminator seeds to their farmers, making them dependent on Western loans and Western buyers; they see us reorienting their agriculture to export crops so that businessmen can grow fat while peasants' children starve.

They see us wall off our borders so that the tired, the poor, can no longer escape the semi-slavery of their maquiladoras. They see us strut across the stage at Kyoto to tell the destitute of the world that they must sacrifice to clean up messes we have made. They see American guns in the hands of their brutal overseers. And they become the allies of the sort of men who drove those planes into the towers in New York.

Militant Islamists will speak of Israel as a root cause for their discontent, but I think that Israel here is more an emblem than a fact. Israel occupies a tiny sliver of desert, a fingernail clipping by comparison to the vast reaches of the Arab lands. Israel was the homeland of the Jews for over two thousand years before Mohammed was born. Arabs can live in Israel if they want; Jews cannot visit most Arab countries--nor can Palestinians move to Jordan, which comprises the bulk of historical Palestine. There would still be conflict in Palestine without the American influence in Israel--there would still be conflict in Palestine if Israel did not exist--but I think that Islamists target Israel in part because they see her as a pawn of the United States, the great usurper.

What Will You Do?

We will not end it by seeking revenge upon people who thrive on revenge. If we do, then they will see that we have accepted their rules of engagement. And more planes will dive out of the sky, more bombs will explode in front of banks and courthouses (as they do in Israel every week). "Revenge is mine," not man's, says the Lord of all the parties to this conflict. We must try something else.

Resist the satisfactions of hatred. Don't call for the carpet bombing of Afghanistan, for waves of Marines to march on Kabul, for CIA assassination teams. Let us not accept their terms for the conflict, but follow instead the course of law. This is not, as someone said today, an equivalent to Pearl Harbor: Pearl Harbor was an attack by uniformed troops on a military installation. Today the planes came from American airports. "They" could not have done what they did today without assistance from the disenfranchised of our own American population, to circumvent the airport security measures that have become so comfortably, fatally routine in the last few quiet years. It isn't "us vs. them"; it's "all of us vs. all of us" in a complicated and inter-permeable world. Hatred feeds on separation; love dissolves boundaries.

Reach out to your neighbors, share the sorrow and the comfort of communal speech, of the little words of condolence and of pain that let us know we're not alone in our confusion.

Counter those who counsel for revenge, and ask them what they fear that makes them speak in anger. Ask yourself what you fear if you are angry. Is it, after all, that "they"--whoever "they" turn out to be--blame you for their own anger? And that in some small way they may be right?

Look around you at the comforts that you have bought, and ask yourself what share of them derives from someone's suffering in some distant village. Refuse to participate in the neocolonial economy. Buy your food, when you can, at farmer's markets, not from the corporate economy that depends on peon labor. Buy clothes, when you can, from local owner-producers or from companies that have a reputation for labor fairness and environmental gentleness. And get out of your car whenever you can--ride a bicycle, get on the bus or the train, or just walk to the store if you really need to go to the store. For more or less half of every dollar that we spend on crude goes to fill the pockets of some feudal billionaire who may just be Osama bin Laden.

We do not yet know who caused the horror of the morning. But we do know who the enemy is: it is the selfishness and the hatred that can exist in any heart, in any country. Let that not exists in ours.

Richard Risemberg

Go to "In the Face of Tragedy," by Eric Miller

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