What have we learned in the last year? From all appearnces, some have learned that the U.S. is still the center of the world (at least the world that matters) and that we have the right, no - the obligation, to set the world running the way we think it ought to go. Some have also learned more than we wanted about real heroism, grief, sadness and the need to be involved in the world beyond the borders of pop culture.

Writing in the September Harper's magazine, author Mark Slouka examines America a year later. Thoughtful, challenging and revealing, Slouka put the event in context.

"I believe, to put it plainly," he wites, "that last year's attack was so traumatic to us because it simultaneously exposed and challenged the myth of our own uniqueness, A myth most visible, perhaps, in our age-old denial of death. . . This was not just a terorist attack. This was an act of metaphysical trespass."

Slouka tells of hearing a minister acquaintance "confess to undergoing a crisis of faith (after the attacks) so severe that he was considering leaving the Church.

"When I wondered aloud to another acquaintance how it was possible for a man's faith to sail over Auschwitz,say, only to founder on the World Trade Center, I found myself quickly taken to task for both my myopia and my callousness. . .'and anyway (asked the friend) who are you to decide when it's right for someone to have a crisis of faith.?'

"The answer . . . was easy enough: no one, though I did reserve the right to wonder at the minister's timing, or where his faith might have been hiding when half a million human beings were being massacred in Rwanda, not a few of them in churches."

Slouka later notes that "this was not London during the Blitz. Or Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. Or Sarajevo in 1994. Thousands of innocents had died, true. But innocents had been dying for a while, now - millions of them, mostly children, as quietly as melting snow each and every year."

So what's the difference today? Slouka says we filed it away. "Now I understood how we had managed to endure the slow disintegration of Bosnia with such fortitude: we had simply filed it . . . under the rubric 'Bad Things That Occur to People Who Are Not Americans.'"

Our grief and our sense of loss is real and needs no justification. Thousands of families suffered terribly and at the whims of religious fanatics with no thought of anything other than their own self-righteousness. And we rightfully ask "why?" Some possible answers are out there, waiitng for us to see and act on the knowledge.

A final quote from the essay. "Some years ago at the University of California, San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century Rome and the dawn of the Christian Era. She seemed genuinely disturbed by something. 'I know you're all going to think this is crazy,' she said, 'but I always thought Jesus was an American'

"A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I have ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation. What she had expressed, with an almost poetic compaction, was the core myth of America."

Now "the events of Septenber 11th" have entered into the canon of American history. Maybe this will be seen someday as the moment when America, instead of standing apart from it, joined the world.

dwf
1:38:30 PM    Comments?()