Today is the Anniversary of September 11th, 2001 tragedies. Last night President Obama spoke of the military operations to be carried out in Iraq and Syria. My heart sank. I know that there is immense suffering, and immense hatred and cruelty. While his presentation is more palatable than when we heard something similar over a decade ago, it also seems very much the same.
I don’t know what the answer is.
I think of the Dominican Sisters in Iraq who fear for their lives. I especially think of my friend Diana. I want them all protected, safe, and free to tend to their peoples’ joys and sorrows. “Violence begets violence” seems both true and an oversimplification. A military approach to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL” seems like an incredibly aggressive position. But I also don’t want the people slaughtered.
I don’t know what the answer is.
I think of the term “Post 9/11 mentality.” Certainly every side bares its affects. What would be different with a “Pre 9/11 mentality?”
Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, has taken on such an experiment. He was a prisoner of war in World War II. He was in Dresden when the allies firebombed it, leveling it to the ground. While considered a science-fiction writer, his style is not the usual flavor for the genre. He writes with humor about very serious things, and emphasizes the importance of our humanity, peacemaking and kindness. In Slaughter House Five, Billy Pilgrim is a fictional stand-in for Vonnegut. Pilgrim—and perhaps Vonnegut as well—very likely has what today we call PTSD. In this scene from Slaughter House Five, Billy is experiencing “detachment from time.” His thoughts extend backward, forward, and sideways. Time for Billy is slippery at best.
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.
Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
Slaughter House Five, Chapter 4
If time were slippery for you, like it is for Billy Pilgrim, what moment in your life, or in the history of humanity, would you like to see revisited or recreated in the present for sake of our humanity, peacemaking and kindness? If shared with the right person, people, or powers, what would be the best possible outcome for an issue that we face today?
I find myself looking for those answers in times like the era of The New Deal, when the WPA (Work Progress Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) built the US highways systems and the national parks to help pull the country out of the great depression.
“But what on Earth does that have to do with September 11th, or declaring everything short of war once again?” A friend and teacher of mine recently reminded me of a basic principle: Almost all conflict can be traced back to someone being robbed of dignity, or the perception of being robbed of their dignity. The New Deal was not about vanquishing problems. It was about growing solutions. An approach which could go a long way both at home and abroad. If I could carry the President, the Speaker of the House, and some of the leaders of ISIL through the wormhole of time, I would set a course for the Oval Office. We would sit down for a nice fireside chat with a presidential polio survivor, and see what we as humanity might conspire to do.
May all of our best memories guide us as peacemakers, and may all who are suffering be relieved.