September 11, 2001

By Keith Boykin, in politics·pop culture·spirituality
Friday, September 14 2001, 11:40AM

Originally posted on Gay.com

I struggled for days to find words to discuss the devastation here in New York. Ultimately, I realized the terrorist attack, and our reaction to it, reflects the best and worst of who we are as humans.

At our best, hundreds of fire fighters and police officers raced to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon after the attacks, with many losing their lives attempting to rescue others. At our worst, dozens of people rushed into the dusty void to call in copycat bomb threats and to spread false rumors and hoaxes. At our best, we are caring, sensitive, loving, heroic, forgiving people. At our worst, we are cruel, violent, destructive, jealous and hateful.

All of us are all of these things because all of us are human. The sad truth is that violence persists in the world not because some people in a different land are violent, but because we are violent as well. We know no more effective way to express our pain at violence than to reciprocate with our own. Thus we wage war in whatever way we know how because we know not how to wage peace.

The belligerent response of U.S. Senator Zell Miller, D-Ga., epitomized the popular sentiment among some Americans. "Bomb the hell out of them," Miller said, ignoring the unknown identity of "them" and dismissing the risk of killing innocent people as acceptable "collateral damage." At times of intense grief and pain, it seems very human to lash out in response.

Meanwhile, some on the right and left used the terrorist attack as an opportunity to demonize the evil they see in America. Some Palestinians, for example, openly celebrated the attack as a victory in the streets of the West Bank while televangelist Jerry Falwell stretched to blame the incident on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians." Falwell suggested that this is what happens "when a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture."

Falwell and the Palestinians both oversimplify the diversity of America. First, many of the victims were not just Americans but Arab and Palestinian as well. In a city and country cut from the cloth of many different cultures, those who would attack America rip the fabric from their own people in doing so. Similarly, the attack did not discriminate against those who were and were not "saved" by Falwell's God. Surely, there were many "God-fearing," anti-abortion, heterosexual Christians who perished in the attack as well.

So whom do we blame? It would be easy to point the finger at Osama bin Laden, assuming he's responsible for the attacks, but that only illustrates our own violent propensities. Bin Laden, after all, was trained to be a terrorist by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency when the Afghani rebels were engaged in a bloody civil war against the Soviets. Once the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, the United States had no effective plan to create democratic government in the country it helped to militarize. In fact, the ironic legacy of the cold war may be that the same nations the United States once armed to fight the communists will ultimately end up fighting us.

Some would blame the incident primarily on U.S. intelligence and security forces for failing to stop the hijackings, but this approach is problematic. Even the most invasive intelligence and security measures cannot stop every attack. The highly regarded Israeli security forces, for example, have not brought an end to the daily attacks in that country. Nor should we expect to fight our way out of violence in this country either. Commentator Tavis Smiley perhaps put it best when he said, if we can't win a war against drugs in our own country, how can we win a war against terrorists in another country?

We can try to track people before they commit acts of terrorism or hunt them down and kill them once they do, but that won't stop terrorism either. Unfortunately, there's very little we can do to stop someone who is willing to give up his own life to take someone else's. And for every terrorist we do find and punish, another is waiting in the wings to avenge his death.

With all the finger-pointing going on, eventually we need to point the finger at ourselves, not just at America or Afghanistan or the CIA or the FAA. There will be plenty of time to point fingers at all those targets. Instead, we need to examine the culture of violence we have created. To do this, we need not look at our neighbor or our enemy or even our president. We need only look in our mirrors.