There is never any justification for acts of terror
against innocent civilians--not in Israel and not in the
U.S.--it is the quintessential act of dehumanization and not
recognizing the sanctity of others, and a visible symbol of a
world increasingly irrational and out of control.
It's understandable why many of us, after grieving and
consoling the mourners, feel anger. Unfortunately, demagogues
in the White House and Congress have manipulated our
legitimate outrage and channeled it into a new militarism and a
revival of the deepest held belief of the conservative
world-view: that the world is mostly a dangerous place and our
lives must be based around protecting ourselves from the
threatening others. In this case, terrorism provides a perfect
base for this worldview--it can come from anywhere, we don't
really know who is the enemy, and so everyone can be suspect
and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced rage. With this
as a foundation, the Bush team has been able to turn this
terrible and outrageous attack into a justification for massive
military spending, a new war and the inevitable trappings:
repression of civil liberties, denigration of "evil others," and a
new climate of fear and intimidation against anyone who doesn't
join this misuse of patriotism toward distorted ends.
Of course, the people who did this attack are evil
and they are a real threat to the human race. If they
could, they would use nuclear weapons or chemical/biological
weapons. The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I
personally would be happy if all the people involved in this act
were to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. But that is
quite different from talk about "eliminating countries" which we
heard from Colin Powell in the days after the attack. Punishing
the perpetrators is different from making war against whole
populations.
The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid
dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so
prevalent throughout the planet, it's too easy to simply talk of
"deranged minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in
the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating
each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many
people?" And why is it that our immediate response to violence
is to use violence ourselves--thus reenforcing the cycle of
violence in the world?
We in the spiritual world will see the root problem here as
a growing global incapacity to
recognize the spirit of God in each other--what we call the
sanctity of each human being.
But even if you reject religious language, you can see that the
willingness of people to hurt each other
to advance their own interests has become a global problem,
and its only the dramatic level of this particular attack which
distinguishes it from the violence and insensitivity to each
other that is part of our daily lives.
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has
"nothing to do" with
the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one
out
of every three people on this planet does not have enough food,
and
that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure
ourselves
that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society
in
world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate
globalization
with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with
the
resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves
that the
suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with
us--that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else.
But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with
everyone,
and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and
desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.
The same inability to feel the pain of others
is the pathology that shapes the minds of these terrorists.
Raise children in
circumstances where no one is there to take care of them, or
where
they must live by begging or selling their bodies in prostitution,
put them in refugee camps and tell them that that they have "no
right
of return" to their homes, treat them as though they are less
valuable and deserving of respect because they are part of some
despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a media
that
extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically
successful
and physically trim and conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about
themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the
"bottom
line" of someone else, and teach them that "looking out for
number
one" is the only thing anyone "really" cares about and that
anyone
who believes in love and social justice are merely naive idealists
who are destined to always remain powerless, and you will
produce a
world-wide population of people feeling depressed, angry,
unable to care about others, and in
various ways dysfunctional.
I see this in Israel, where Israelis have taken to
dismissing the entire Palestinian people as "terrorists" but
never ask themselves: "What have we done to make this seem
to Palestinians to be a reasonable path of action today." Of
course there were always some hateful people and some
religious fundamentalists who want to act in hurtful ways against
Israel, no matter what the circumstances. Yet, in the situation
of 1993-96 when Israel under Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing a
path of negotiations and peace, the fundamentalists had little
following and there were few acts of violence. On the other
hand, when Israel failed to withdraw from the West Bank, and
instead expanded the number of its settlers, the
fundamentalists and haters had a far easier time convincing
many decent Palestinians that there might be no other
alternative.
Similarly, if the U.S. turns its back on global agreements to
preserve the environment, unilaterally cancels its treaties to
not build a missile defense, accelerates the processes by which
a global economy has made some people in the third world
richer but many poorer, shows that it cares nothing for the fate
of refugees who have been homeless for decades, and
otherwise turns its back on ethical norms, it becomes far easier
for the haters and the fundamentalists to recruit people who are
willing to kill themselves in strikes against what they perceive
to be an evil American empire represented by the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center.
Most Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this
"larger picture." It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we
are
part of a world system which is slowly destroying the life support
system of the planet, and quickly transferring the wealth of the
world into our own pockets.
We don't feel personally responsible
when an American corporation runs a sweat shop in the
Phillipines or
crushes efforts of workers to organize in Singapore. We don't
see
ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the
plight of
Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to
support
repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America. We
don't
even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's
military
center and our trade center--we talk of them as buildings,
though
others see them as centers of the forces that are causing the
world
so much pain.
We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through"
or "doing well" in our own personal lives, and who has time to
focus
on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly
reasonable
lives within the options that we have available to us--so why
should
others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the
truth
is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others
in
acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system
that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will also
be counter-productive. We
should have learned from the current phase of the
Israel-Palestinian struggle , responding
to terror with more violence, rather than asking ourselves what
we could do to change the conditions that
generated it in the first place, will only ensure more violence
against us in the future.
Luckily, most people don't act out in violent ways--they
tend to act out more against themselves, drowning
themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair. Others turn
toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism.
Still others find themselves acting out against people that they
love,
acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship
partners.
