Waiting for History

I started this post yesterday, trying to think about the lessons we've learned, but got hung up trying to sort through a number of conflicting thoughts about the whole 9/11 industry, and so put it off. The delay proved (to me, anyway) once again the value of leisurely cogitation. Deadlines are all well and good -- I probably get more accomplished with them than without them -- but sometimes the timely is the enemy of the good (and, pace Ms. Huffington) first thought is not always best thought.


Like many, I can remember precisely where I was when I first heard about the plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just as I can remember clearly where I was when I first heard that JFK had been shot, when I first heard Eleanor Rigby on the radio, when I first saw my future wife, when the Northridge Quake hit.


Each of those was clearly a point in time when I was aware this is a discontinuity, a break in the seemingly seamless narrative of my life. Some moments are shared with others, but the truly profound impacts are always personal.


The fact that I and millions could watch the towers burning, see video of the second impact, and watch in real time as the first, and then the second tower fell, even though I was thousands of miles from New York, created a public moment of almost unprecedented scale.  Out of that public moment came a shared agreement that this changes everything, that now we have learned something important about how the world works.


So, that's what I'm trying to ask myself now: What changed? What have we learned? (And by "we" I mean the political and news elite, largely based in New York and Washington,  who define what passes for conventional wisdom in public discourse.)


We learned who the hijackers were, and how they spent their last days and hours, but did we learn why they chose this course of action? We learned that the bulk were from Saudi Arabia, but did we learn anything about the bizarre alignment of sybaritic sheiks and wrathful Wahhabi priests that share control of the Saudi kingdom? Did we learn anything of the Bush family's three generations of intimate relations with the Saudi royal family and oil interests? Of the festering popular discontent, in Arabia and elsewhere, with the huge role the Saudis (royals and Wahhabi) play in regional politics?


On the other hand, did we learn that the US is not an island, that we share a larger world with other people, other cultures, with many different ideas about personal and cultural ideals? Did we recognize that a nation is not defined simply by its leaders, any more than the US can be solely defined as Republican or Democrat, no matter who's in power?


Did we learn that in order to understand current conditions, we have to allow that unintended outcomes must always be taken into account? That our role in geopolitics, especially post-WWII, makes us the antagonist to many other cultures, that our vaunted power is most easily seen as a threat? That no matter what we think the cause or justification, aggression will be seen as aggression? That it can take decades, or even centuries, for these forces to play out?


And, critically, did we learn from the profoundly human tragedy of September 11, 2001, the tragedy we've been witnessing again the past few days, that individual lives do matter, no matter what the country, the politics, the religion?


When I referred to the 9/11 industry, I was thinking specifically of the common thread in almost everything I saw or heard yesterday on the news, an agreement that somehow what happened at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, on Flight 93 was all about our tragedy, best displayed in personal terms of our loss. That is powerful, and real, but it is only a first step in learning the lessons we need to learn. 


The Greek playwrights (and their audiences) valued tragedy because it allows people (as a community, as well as individuals) to re-experience that sense of discontinuity, and to start fresh, one more time, to try to get past the ignorance and hubris that contributed to the tragedy in the first place.


I suppose the real lesson is that eight years is too short a time to really assess what we have learned. At the same time, there is no excuse that allows not asking the key questions whenever we can. We just have to be patient, and wait for history's gears and wheels to do their slow, pitiless work. And, while we're waiting, keep pushing for better answers here and now.