9/11/01 What should we remember?

I feel deeply for all the victims of the events of 9/11/01, and their families. I was living in Buffalo at the time. I was lucky, not losing any of my friends who lived or worked near the tragedy. I also felt the wash of response and reaction to the events of that day, some of them effecting the course of my life, a minor thing compared to what happened on and around the scene of that day.

On that day in 1973 an equal number of people died in Chile under Pinochet. Cultural icons and others were rounded up and killed. That event happened with US support. As did the punitive bombings in Germany which resulted in a 9/11 kind of loss every night for months. And while we live in remembrance of 9/11 and some smaller versions of it, many Nations in the world, who are, in the last analysis, no less our kin than those we lost that day, they live daily under the threat of bombings, attacks, abduction, imprisonment and torture, never mind the general fear and tension of just being there.

I'm not against abstracting our own great loss as a memorable event of great pain and sorrow. It is right and just and necessary to do so. What is good to remember also, in our relative, though diminishing relative comfort, is that we are remembering the actions of humans on other humans. So, what is "our own?"

Notwithstanding the artificial labels, or artificial borders and artificial economics and artificial religions, we all in fact carry the same gene from an original and actual human "Eve," as any geneticist will tell us. There is, similarly, I believe, an "Adam" gene. The variations we call races and cultures are superficial fictions carried as software in the expressions of the  very slightly varying hard wiring of being Human.

All the 9/11 events in the world, all those and all the other horrors and indignities perpetrated on humans are perpetrated by other humans who artificially decide that someone else isn't, whether that decision is unilateral or mutual, All these are humans doing things to humans. Indeed, the iconic Walt Kelly may have summed up the entire dynamic in one paraphrased sentence from his Pogo character in that famous comic strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

We are not surprised to hear that someone is "their own worst enemy." Why? Because we all are. And the cumulative result of that, manifesting as economic systems, political systems, religious systems, anything based on hypothetical fear and lack, whether of food, money, or God, all of that is intrinsically violent. Yes, even religion, on examination, is intrinsically violent. And there is no doubt that "economy" as we practice it is hugely violent, and clearly brings violence on us. And indeed it is a far stretch to relate what we do for money to the root meaning of "economy," which means managing a home. Earth is our home, and our violence to the Earth is but a side effect of the violence we do to ourselves and each other.

And one of the worst forms of violence is passivity. Not doing is the grand rationalization of someone who is comfortable, who is not under a threat perceived as immediately life threatening, who can see that "of course" the evil in the world is being done by someone else.

But still, by omission or ignorance, belief being one of the chief ways of being ignorant, we are violent to ourselves. We are violent by the lack of work on ourselves, and on not calling each other on crap in a useful way, or by reacting to being called out when we know, especially when we fear that we are doing crap. This is especially true when we are doing crap in the name of the God we make up to justify ourselves. Or and especially when we feel that our bankbook, our insatiable bankbook, is threatened not even by diminishment, but by an inadequate rate of growth.

And we have these fears because in fact, at root, we have no clue about who and what we are, and we feel cast out even within our family and friends, never mind our block, town, city, or Nations. Few do the work to dig at the mine/mind of their own habitual inculcated person to find the Real gold there. Those who believe we are "created in the image and likeness" might well note that, more than they do dogmas and tenets, and look at what the blueprint is in reality, and not of some modification of a Teaching diluted by ignorance and years.

We can see that somehow, while we revere the ones who truly show some compassion for the human situation, we fail to notice that they have that compassion because they have suffered greatly. They suffered greatly by their circumstances, but mostly it was because thy faced their own internal monsters,. their own lies, their own prejudices, and their own beliefs. Not only have they suffered greatly, but somehow they were able to make the great leap across the chasm that separates one from another. They were and are able to generalize and distribute their own condition over others as a recognition of identity.

These are men and women who to some degree and kind, even if not perfect, know in their stomach that even their purported enemy is but themselves wearing another body and another life experience that led them involuntarily, for the most part, to their differences. These people, these men and women who recognize and feel the incompetent humanity of their enemy actually know what the Golden Rule or the Great Commandments are about: They know that when they face their enemy, they are looking in the mirror. Literally. In the mirror. So they act that way.

But we are a people, uncivilized and with dangerous toys, who crucify their saviors. We will gladly impale them, poison them, nail them up, hang them, shoot them, or whatever. Why? Because they had the insulting effrontery to require of us--by their example of doing so themselves--to look within our own self. And far, far worse, again and more dangerously by the example of doing it themselves, to change. This is the most audacious crime against our comfort, and we won't bear it in other than small homeopathic doses.

But sometimes that homeopathy takes hold. MLK or Gandhi precipitated movements for change. They made it unavoidable to look at ourselves. And they still do that from beyond the grave they went to, too early. The difference is that they earned their rest; many above ground are dead and rotting and don't know it. At the very least they are sleepwalkers . Is it a wonder that zombies, eating the brains of the living, are so popular? It may be symbolic of our actual situation.

So what might be some signs of life, if living is indeed what we wish to do, and we know that, and that there is change involved? First, perhaps it would be good, as simplistic as it sounds, to acknowledge and often remind ourselves of what it is that we fundamentally are, and what is the only thing we fundamentally and inevitably have in common with everyone and everything sentient: ask "Am I aware?" Ask it a lot, no matter how silly or strained it might feel. There is gold and riches in that question.

Second, are you capable of sitting for ten to twenty minutes looking intently at the inside of your eyelids, keeping awake, and not making up a story, or at lest just watching your thoughts go by as a story? Can you unstick yourself from your story about you? There's a job. And if you can do it, how you look at other "people" will change radically. You might even experience peace. And if there is any fitting memorial for all the 9/11s of the world, that might be it.