Three Years After
It’s still hard to believe so much time has passed.
Three years ago yesterday, I was in the Trial Defense Office in Seoul, folding my uniforms and packing my suitcase, preparing to fly to Japan to litigate about a dozen motions I had filed in a court-martial case there. The TV was on, and I was watching Diane Sawyer talk about J-Lo or “Survivor” or Robert Blake whatever non-story circus was preoccupying us that day. When they cut to the footage of the fire in the first tower, it honestly didn’t occur to me that it was anything but an accident. After all, hadn’t a B-25 hit the Empire State Building during World War II? But then, as I watched the screen, and that plane flew past the second tower–but didn’t–something hit me,too. I stopped packing and started making phone calls.
After four years overseas, I returned to a post-9/11 America had become perceptably less selfish, less self-absorbed, less superficial than it had been. Yet such trends are often fleeting, and certainly that’s true when you concentrate naturally superficial and self-indulgent people into a single sphere, as parts of this country are. You even have a few compulsive self-haters, who will always find ways to blame the object of their enmity–and the country onto which they project it–in defiance of all of the available facts. My theory of the week is that they were picked on mercilessly as kids and hate themselves for not fighting back, but hey, I’m no shrink. The overall feeling in this country–even among those who for sound intellectual reasons opposed the war in Iraq–is the one I share: anger and defiance.
Yesterday, my mom flew in from South Dakota to help us with the new baby. Empty plane. Empty parking lots. No traffic in D.C. Just flags everywhere–flags at half staff, flags on car antennas, flags hanging over every overpass on the road from Dulles into the city. Now try to tell me that we’re over 9/11. For a hundred years, when you ask Americans what they think of Islam, and they will think of children hurled into skyscrapers, of bodies falling from burning buildings, of mothers telling children about the fathers they never knew, of dogs gassed as test subjects for human beings, of childen shot in the back, of a rows of Nepalese slaughtered just for leaving their families behind in an attempt to keep them fed, of beheading videos, and of the depraved people who danced in the streets and on charred vehicles to celebrate acts of that kind. Yes, there will be those who see scenes like this and immediately ask “why do they hate us?” But I’m pretty confident that the majority of us thought, “if only I were there . . . with a friggin’ flamethrower, I’d show ’em how we make kebabs!” And then we tell ourselves that we don’t mean it, even as our emotions tell us that in the darkest pits of our souls, if we are honest, we really do. And if Islam continues to descend further into depravity, more and more of us–and more Russians, British, Australians, and Nepalese, maybe even French, South Koreans, and Chinese, will. The world is learning that it is of no use being loved in the Muslim world. Lacking that, it will opt to be feared.
For me, the image that lasts may always be the obituary of a woman in her 40s who lost her husband in the Pentagon. In her picture in the Post, she smiled beautifully. Just a year after he husband died, she was gone, too. Who knows why? What could cause a young, healthy woman to suddenly become unhealthy and leave this world? Who will take care of the two little boys she left behind?
And finally, just what did 9/11 accomplish for those who planned, executed, and celebrated it? The answer may well be the degrinolade for Islam as it exists today. Islam must either adapt–as Christianity has since the Dark Ages and its European nadir–into a philosophy that advances civilization. The alternative is that it will continue to show itself to the world as a death cult, descending to ever greater levels of moral perversion, and thus uniting the world in a common disgust toward those who are permitted to represent it.