Five Years Later, Still Looking for an Equitable Response

The beginning of September 2001 had been a difficult one for me, full of transitions, new faces, and a new home. I had just uprooted my life, moved from the familiar confines of Boston to Berkeley, Calif., to start a masters of divinity program at the Pacific School of Religion. I knew very few people, and had left friends and family members back on the East Coast, many in NYC.

The night of September 10, I was exhausted and asked my roommate not to wake me up the next morning "even if World War III broke out." Something other than him did wake me up early that morning, an inner sense that something was wrong perhaps, and I saw on the inside of my bedroom door a note. I got up to read it, it said simply: terrorists have attacked NYC and D.C., your sister is okay.

Dazed and frightened, I stumbled out to the living room where my roommate's face and the television screen said everything. Seconds later, I watched in horror as the first tower began to collapse. This was worse than any nightmare. I had awakened to a suddenly changed world, where even the idea of world war would be flipped on its head.

It was then a day like many other Americans had on September 11. I burned through many cell phone minutes feverishly trying to get in touch with loved ones in NYC. As many found, the cells failed us, quick busy signals were all I could reach. Finally, a friend set up a makeshift website for everyone to post messages and share what we knew. Amazing stories were told. Someone who had escaped from a floor of the World Trade Center they had no business of getting off of. Another friend who had accidentally slept in that day, to be saved from who knows what fate had he not.

In the end, all were okay in one sense, but no one was the same. Those in NYC felt a sense of bonding that no one outside that city would ever fully grasp. And those who were elsewhere felt vulnerable in a way that seemed preposterous just the night before. And then, quickly, came the feared knee-jerk response from our leaders -- and the true disaster of the 2000 elections was suddenly clear. This confused man from Texas would be the voice that attempted to lead our country through this most precarious of times.

No suprise that, five years later, more Americans would blame his adminstration for the events of that day than did nine months after it occurred. So, where does that leave us? Besides in desperate need of a new world vision for how to treat our global neighbors, it leaves us needing real leadership now more than ever. Everything this country has done in response to these events since that day has been an unmitigated disaster. Two wars of very questionable value and results, thousands upon thousands of more dead, many of them innocent members of the U.S. armed forces who signed up in peace times with promises of citizenship, college education, and training. Civil liberties being eroded, and the reallocation of billions of dollars to defense spending. None of which responds to the real problem facing the United States: how to move closer to an equitable sharing of the world's resources. Because, in the end, no one hates freedom, they simply hate being on the wrong end of the resource war.

I hope and pray that we can find this balance soon, before it's too late. Only that will truly honor those who lost their lives on 9/11/01.