This Saturday will be the ninth anniversary of 9/11 a time when the terror of the world came home. In many ways, not much has changed since then; the poor are still getting poorer and the rich richer. Corporations have more power than before. And we are clearly the world’s imperial power. But in other ways, subtler, and more personal, life has changed for almost all of us. We grieve those losses still, with a mixture of sorrow and righteous anger. We have politicized that anger in our foreign policy and we have ratified our fear domestically through terror alerts and homeland security.
Our world is such a fragile place. A pastor in Florida is planning on burning Korans this Saturday in protest to Islam as “a religion of the devil”. Religious pundits are making political hay from speaking out against an Islamic center being built near the World Trade Center. Religious intolerance seems as prevalent today as it was on 9/11/2001. If we ever needed to work toward restoration in our world and even among ourselves this would be the time.
What happens after a traumatic event, an illness, a disaster, a fight, or the loss of a loved one is that we tend to lose our way. We become fearful, we change. We hunger for a return to our true and better selves. I believe that all this anger and conservative backlash, including Glenn Beck’s “I Have a Scheme” speech on the National Mall around the same time MLK gave his dream speech a while back, is a misguided attempt at restoration. A return to what is familiar is often born of fear. What we need, rather, is a return to promise and hope, along with the loss and change which brings us through our darker hours.
In order to be restored we must be prepared to speak out against fear. We must be prepared to speak truth to ignorance. We must be prepared to bear witness to reason and love. We must be prepared to stand on the side of love.
With Grace and Grit, John
