(Author's note: This post was supposed to go up last week. Life, as it often does, had other ideas.)“Hand….Salute!”There are some moments that are forever burned into our memory. I remember vividly being in a lecture as a freshman at Iowa State, hearing whispers of a twin engine plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Five years later, I remember standing at attention with the rest of my NOAA Basic Officer Training Class, along with the academy midshipmen, on the parade grounds of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy as the chaplain read a prayer and the band played a stirring rendition of “Eternal Father Strong to Save” intermixed with Taps. It was a clear, crisp fall morning, not unlike the one five years before. We could see across the East River, to the now misshapen city skyline a few miles away, where half a decade ago smoke had filled the sky. It was a powerful, emotional moment.
September 11, 2001 was a day the forever changed our nation.
Should it have?
Information might well be the most important commodity of our age. If you have a smartphone, you literally have the whole world’s collective knowledge in your pants pocket. Yet how many people are uninformed and misinformed?
I think we all felt a little fear on 9-11. Fear is a powerful, if not the most powerful, human emotion. And the only antidote to fear is information. No enemy is as frightful when we know their next move. And the more we know about them, the less scary they become. When the Soviet Union first deployed the MiG-25 Foxbat jet fighter, the western world was terrified of it. But when intelligence officials got their hands on one when the pilot defected to Japan, they found it was a paper tiger. It was made of crude materials, and even had vacuum tubes in the electronics, a woefully outdated technology even then. When we found Osama bin Laden, the man who had for so many years seemed like a James Bond-like supervillian looked like he’d be more at home in a trailer park, with his dingy t-shirt and porn stash, than in a volcano base guarded by ninjas. Sometimes the things that scare us are more worthy of ridicule than fear. Bin Laden thought by attacking us he would force us to leave Muslim lands. How’d that work out for ya, buddy?
Which brings me to my next point: Why they hate us. If you picked “because of our freedoms!”, sorry, wrong answer, but thanks for playing. The reasons are too complex to go into in a short blog post such as this. And that’s why reading is so important: The world is too complex, too complicated to be broken down into easily digestible sound bites, despite what our 24 hour news channels would like us to believe. Most of us don’t want to take the time to understand the issues. Ours is a generation of “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read), possibly the laziest way to describe laziness ever invented. We want the news spoon-fed to us, in a way that makes complicated things simple, and presented to us from the point of view we favor. And there are lots of people out there that are more than happy to do that for us. Because if you’re not interested in being part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
Misinformation is everywhere, and the powers that be may release it thinking you are too stupid or too lazy to question it, particularly if it reinforces what you want to believe. During the health care law debate I had a number of people tell me ridiculous things they had read about it, and since they were opposed to the new law, they were more than happy to buy into whatever negative press they read about it. When I asked them if they had actually seen it in the text of the law, all 1000+ pages of it available on the congressional website, the answer was invariably “no”. Everything you read has some kind of agenda behind it; consider that when you read it. (My agenda, for instance, is to get people to read as much as they can and think critically about what they have read.)
As a storyteller, you want a clear distinction between the hero and the villain. Yet the real world rarely allows such distinctions. Perhaps this explains our fascination with World War 2, where our enemies were kind enough to be cartoonishly evil and clearly mark themselves with sinister symbols and uniforms. The modern world is not nearly so tidy. Understanding the complexities of other cultures may offer us a path to diffuse future conflicts before they start, or at the very least mitigate damage done when they do break out. Choosing the path of ignorance can only lead to disaster.
“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly”, wrote acclaimed scifi author Robert Heinlein, and truer words have never been written. Only the truly twisted among us revel in being bad guys. And the horrors of war can quickly blur the lines between good guys and bad guys. The book I mentioned in my last post, Unbroken, detailed not only the horrific abuse that American POW’s suffered at the hands of some truly sadistic Japanese guards, but also tales of guards who were uncomfortable with the mistreatment and even some who, at great personal risk, kept the starving prisoners alive. As a writer, my favorite villains are the most morally complex ones, the ones who, at the very least, were initially trying to do what they thought was right. And even the most inhumane among us are still, on some level, human.
I shed no tears for the passing of the architect of 9-11. He and his ilk may indeed have some legitimate gripes, but there is no justification for the deliberate slaughter of so many innocent people around the world. Yet among the things they found in his personal effects, there was a letter to his children, lamenting the fact he’d spent so much time away from them, and what father hasn’t, at least at some point, ever felt that way? I can’t help but wonder, when the first shots rang out that May night, as the SEALs made their way up the stairwell, what when through his mind? He had to know it was over. There was no escape. His organization was broken and scattered, with most of its leadership dead or captured, their financial situation was dire, and most of his own people despised him. Add to that the fact his original aim, to rid the Middle East of Western military and cultural presence, had backfired catastrophically. Did he have regrets? Did he finally feel remorse, knowing that all he had ever accomplished was making the world a worse place, both for his enemies and his own children? Did he wish he would have found another way? We’ll never know.
We wonder how anyone could be convinced to fly a passenger jet full of innocent people into a building full of more innocent people. Yet, for those of us who are religious or have been religious, how many decisions are guided by that religion, and how well do we really understand why we do what we do? Our religion might dictate how we eat, how we date, who we marry, even what we wear, yet how many of us could quote a scripture verse justifying those things of the top of our heads, or the context in which the verse was written? How many of us just heard someone we trust tell us “This is God’s will” and we believed it? Can you see the inherent danger of giving someone that kind of power?
Question your faith. Question your convictions. Consider the other points of view. Your beliefs may come out stronger for having survived the challenge. If not, you may feel adrift but you’ll find your way. Understand the world around you, because it’s small and getting smaller. Ignorance may be bliss but it’s nothing to be proud of. This awareness is the debt we owe to the dead of 9/11.
Make no mistake. I’m not some hippie wondering why we all can’t just get along. There is ignorance and then there is evil, and while they are both plentiful in the world, they are two very different animals. In the animal rescue work my wife and I do, we have seen firsthand the callousness and cruelty people are capable of, behaviors that no amount of education or therapy could ever correct. Everything has its yin and yang. There are no heroes without villains, no good without evil. Yet I feel so much of the man-made suffering in the world could be avoided if we all worked harder to cast aside our fear of “other” and tried to understand them more. To paraphrase Heinlein, never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance. Above all, do not yield to that fear of “other”, of those who are different, for it is one that wicked men will use to try to divide people and gain power over them. As comedian Patton Oswalt recently opined, “Nothing frightens people fueled by fear more than people who aren’t”.
