A year ago I wrote a very personal essay in this series about my experience working at Ground Zero* in New York where the twin, one hundred and ten story, World Trade Centers Towers were brought down by some very evil men on September 11, 2001. They plunged two commercial airliners full of innocent people out of the calm New York sky into the huge buildings full of innocent people*.
I was as shocked and outraged as anyone on that terrible day in September. Little did I know, when I volunteered to work at Ground Zero, that this would be just the first of many disasters and many more deaths that would take place over the next twenty years. I could hardly have known I would be involved in trying to heal some of the wounds the subsequent war would inflict on my country.
To say that the attacks changed life in America and so many other countries around the world, would be an understatement. It didn’t just change things, it upended life as we knew it before this terrible event. It continues to impact political and social life in America. It has emboldened our adversaries and caused our traditional allies to question the power and political reliability of the United States. We poured what we were told were our best military and diplomatic resources into a war we said we wanted to end but could/would not.
The war in Afghanistan and the multiple Presidents who oversaw it and Congresses who funded it, reminds me of the old folk tale, “Who Will Bell the Cat”. In this story, mice were having full run of a house and driving the residents quite mad. The owner of the house decided to bring in a cat. From that point on, many mice were caught and killed. The surviving mice called a conference to come up with ideas about how to defeat the cat. Many ideas were expressed but none were ultimately deemed practical. Just before the meeting of the mice ended, one of the mice gathered her courage and suggested that they tie a bell around the cat’s neck so that they would always be forewarned and could scamper to safety. Upon hearing this, the mice started cheering for they saw a solution to their dilemma. The cheering stopped, however, when one of the oldest mice spoke up and asked, “Who is going to bell the cat?”
When no one volunteered, it became apparent that their problem with the cat would continue, and many more of them would die. They left their meeting feeling powerless to change their lives.
Previous Presidents surely looked at how they could end the war in Afghanistan. The last President even said he would do it but in the end left it to his successor to pay the political and social price. He and his supporters have since gone on to do their best to make the current President the last victim of a war he didn’t start. This may very well turn out to be true. Many brave men and women who act courageously do not survive to receive the honors and medals they deserve.
When it became clear that the war in Afghanistan was finally ending, I found myself filled will a multitude of emotions, many of which were seemingly conflicting. I was happy the war was finally over. I was sad for all the families everywhere who lost loved ones in this war. Tied to those feelings were a rush of images and memories of my two decade involvement in this war. For a day or two, I was nearly immobilized by the inner turmoil taking place in me. It was physical and emotional. The hundreds of faces, events, locations and memories flooded me. There were happy memories of my time with so many dedicated and patriotic people. There were incredibly sad times witnessing the impact a death or injury had on the families and friends of the casualties of war.
In my heart there will always be a lingering grief for the damage this war has caused and will cause for decades to come. It is my current clients, my family and my friends who have helped me mobilize and focus again. They are the ones who daily remind me that life must go on, that human problems exist within and without a war.
I have come to see that one can feel this way when war is viewed on the human level. It is not from the political level that job satisfaction is derived. It is from the interaction with your fellow humans and your care and support for them. I was never supportive of the reasons for this last war. But I never let that bleed over into my work with our military personnel and their families. I saw my clients as human beings who were asking for help navigating their lives in very difficult circumstances. Getting a suicidal soldier the help he/she needed was not a political issue for me. It was and always will be a human issue. Helping a family stay intact in the face of multiple deployments and even PTSD** is in my mind an act of peacemaking not war.
Just because I see my work as peacemaking, it does not fully resolve the paradox I have felt over the years of at once participating in a war and simultaneously trying to bring healing to those fighting the war. War itself is perhaps the ultimate paradox in that it attempts to create peace through violent acts.
I have accepted that my “peacemaking” is on the personal level and operates parallel to the military side of war. My work with clients is about caring, supporting, guiding, healing. It is human, not ideologically oriented but it did in its own way support war.
In Aldous Huxley’s 1936 novel, “Eyeless in Gaza”, he uses the latin phrase early on in his narrative, “Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor,” which roughly translated means, “ I see better things and approve, but I follow worse.” This may explain how we as a people can allow be drawn into war even when we know the terrible cost. It is as if we allow ourselves to be blinded by our passion and fears and only after the fact wake up like a drunk from an alcoholic binge and ask ourselves what happened? What have we done?
A post-binge assessment is no guarantee, however, that we will permanently change our ways. So often, along with the remorse comes the assignment of blame to those who started the conflict, who perpetuated it and who failed to achieve victory. It is much easier to rationalize and deflect responsibility than it is to take stock and begin to make better choices. We not only must see better things, as in the quote above from Huxley, we must choose better things.
The next time the drums of war start beating, will there be some among us brave enough to bell the cat? Will society be willing to speak truth to power and demand an honest and clear justification for sending our children to kill someone else’s children? Will I? If not, the cats and the mice of the world will go to war again “eyeless” because they are blind to any better options.
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My essay, “The Pit and the Big White Tent” published on September 20, 2020.
**All total, 2,977 people died including 19 hijackers from the suicide attacks on September 11, 2001. Approximately 6,000 others were injured. There were four plane loads of innocent people killed. Two destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. One was crashed into part of the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and one was brought down into field in Pennsylvania by brave passengers who thwarted what was probably an attack on either the White House or the Capital building.
***PTSD is the abbreviation for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is caused by sustained exposure to violent and incomprehensible events that leave a person with chronic, debilitating anxiety, hyper-arousal and diminished ability to function effectively in society. Many treatment modalities have been developed and thankfully many people with this disorder, with therapeutic support and social support are able to live productive lives.
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