c. 2003 Religion News Service
(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)
(UNDATED) The last Friday of Year Two is an exhilarating day.
Sunny and cool, perfect for driving with the top down. Meetings at work go well. My business development initiatives are taking root. After work, we enjoy dinner with friends, while our children compete happily in a “Magic Tournament.”
It’s hard to remember that we are at war. It’s hard to remember that young men and women remain in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s hard to remember that an implacable enemy means to disrupt and to destroy us by whatever weapons it can muster.
It’s hard to remember that, just days ago, a sudden blackout in the Northeast prompted the alarm, “Terrorists are coming!” It’s hard to remember that legislation passed hastily after Sept. 11 is being doggedly deployed to deprive Americans of their civil liberties. It’s hard to remember that, just two autumns ago, churches, synagogues and mosques filled with people seeking God, reaching across normal hatreds to restore calm.
It’s hard to remember that in September 2001 American flags flew everywhere, that our friends in Europe were still friends, that aircraft carriers were being outfitted for war, not staged for photo ops, that people saw their neighbors as compatriots.
On the last Sunday of Year Two I spoke to a church group. I could have talked about recent disputes at church conventions, at which good and decent people had their time stolen by petty concerns.
But this is a time to remember terrorist attacks. Not in the sense of “Remember the Maine” or “Remember the Alamo,” which became cries for vengeance, but in the sense of remembering first purposes, what matters and who we are.
Our modern culture, you see, depends on amnesia. We must be lulled into buying more than we need, spending what we don’t have, eating ourselves into obesity, accepting “reality TV” as reality, focusing our spiritual yearnings onto stale and dreary concerns, and seeing our neighbors as strangers. What better way to lull us than to take away our memory.
What we learned two autumns ago was not just that we had an implacable enemy. We also saw ourselves with stunning clarity. We saw our flag, not as the private totem of manipulative partisans, but as a symbol of unity. We saw our freedoms as anathema to evil and our signal contribution to human history. We saw our military as brave and worthy of respect. We saw our police, fire and emergency crews as trustworthy friends. We saw our neighbors as people with names and stories.
We saw faith as a yearning for God and for goodness. We saw religious fundamentalism for what it is: a dangerous and prideful perversion of everything that God stands for. We saw the Body of Christ as a sacrament of tears and hope, not as a hateful venture in right opinion and cultural demagoguery.
It is critical that we remember what our culture and politicians want us to forget, namely, that life does matter, freedom is our highest civic calling, bravery and sacrifice build community, faith is a binding of souls, and God loves everything that God has made.
We alienated our allies by forgetting who we are. We are jailing and snooping on our countrymen by forgetting who we are. We have gotten lost again in trivial pursuits like “survivor” entertainment by forgetting who we are. We are back to sneering at the divergent, throwing Scriptures at each other over ramparts of division, as if faux moral obsessions of the self-righteous represented God’s highest call to humanity.
As a result, I think we are more vulnerable than ever to disruption and destruction. Most of our targets haven’t been hardened against attack. The only hardening has been in our attitudes toward each other. Except for a few well-placed contractors, “homeland security” seems more elusive than ever, as a growing cadre of unemployed and uninsured can testify.
We have cleaned up debris, buried the dead and assigned blame. But the better selves that emerged under fire in September 2001 have succumbed to amnesia. The next assault, therefore, is likely to cause panic, pogroms and political assaults on the very freedoms that define us.
DEA END EHRICH
