Once proud, tall and oddly beautiful, the twin world trade center towers are now rubble. Once sleek and well defended, the pentagon has a hole in its heart. The power of molehills is once again being compared favorably to that of mountains. And we are an America, heartbroken and scared. Our outer monuments have been felled -- and what holds us up inside is not in noticeably better shape.
In fact, many of our insides feel like the World Trade Center in the hour after it was hit and before it crumbled. We are as tense as bruised metal, as fragile as steel that has met its match. We are crumbling slowly, just the way the tragedies hit. First one, and its fear. Then the second, and its fear. Then the third made us realize we had only just begun a journey into darkness. These were not isolated actions nor were they news bites. This was not a movie. We even have to start fearing our fear, the very thing FDR told us not to fear at all.
We have to make sense of what happened. We have to pull our attacked insides together. We have to try to hold up, even though someone has punched us in the belly with a 737.
Certainly, not all of us compare ourselves to tall strong steel buildings. And many of us find the Pentagon an unlikely bastion of security. We find our security in God, in each other and then in our country and its monuments and its armed forces. But even those who are patriotic in a humble sort of way feel attacked today. Someone finally got so angry at Americans that they planned and executed an expensive, sacrificial and smart plan of attack against us. The attack was first against working people, those who made the mistake of showing up on time for Tuesday, September 11th at the World Trade Center. Then the attack was against the ordinary American, the cop, the security guard, the nurse, the stewardess, the airplane pilot. None of these people have refused to attend the UN Conference on Racism out of support for Israel nor have they allowed the acceleration of the Middle East conflict. The innocent were bombed in the same way that the innocent were excluded in Durban and moved out in the West Bank.
Three time tested truths will help us make internal sense of our monumental fear and grief. One is to be careful about the innocence bit. There might have been something democratic citizens could have done before now to make peace in the Middle East. There still is something we can do. The symbol of those felled towers makes a lot of people in the world happy. That is a dark and hard truth about how we are perceived -- too rich, too big, too tall, too fancy. Top dog in a world of underdogs, steel towers in a world of shacks. We have a day or so of innocence, not much more. A second is to remember the old song about worry: "Worry gets you no where, absolutely no where, worry gets you no where at all." My office went back to work after we had stared at each other in horror a couple of hours. Terrorists want us to worry: that is their victory. Let them not have it.
A third is to let anger teach its strong, steel like lessons. Anger is a version of love. When we rage at God and our avenging so-called enemies, we can remember that we too are a nation that loves the under-dogs. Violence won't help us: violence begets violence which begets violence. Jesus wasn't kidding when he said to love our enemies and be good to those who hurt us. We must grieve the suicide bombers and their victims, both, not either.
The question that will restore our largeness to ourselves -- and America's largeness to the world -- is what can we do to turn hate towards love. Maybe not tomorrow but the very first second the smoke clears we must get back to our monumental mission in the world. It is a mission of love, not hate, peace, not violence, something truly tall and truly monumental, about liberty and justice for all. It is a monument inside us, just under our fear. It is neither destroyed nor toppled.