Vulnerable to Apocalypse
The smoke and ash still rise from the rubble as these words are written. The anguish of lives lost hovers over city and nation. My present fear is that shortly ashes and rubble will be made elsewhere in the name of the dead. My present hope is that the Word of God may be discerned standing in the shadows of these very events.

The attack on the towers has been called evil. It is. The temptation is to imagine thereby that the U.S. is the very embodiment of good. It is not. Conspicuously fused with the current language of war is a "theology" – a rigid dualism of good and evil. It is a dualism equally suited to terrorists and war-makers.

Our broken hearts are indeed the proper place to begin theological reflection. Wounded hearts, the tears of suffering and death, however, can lead divergent ways. I think of the holocaust, a truly innocent suffering on a vastly different scale, but theologically edifying. So many of those who passed through that horror witnessed to a renewed vision of humanity, a moral passion on behalf of all those who anywhere suffer violence and injustice. But that same history, the same anguish of suffering, can also be invoked to sanction exclusion, demolition, assassination, air strikes and Palestinian apartheid. The meaning of suffering and death is partly a moral choice, theologically put.

In the search for the meaning of these events, the temptation is to be justified by suffering. "Justification" is employed here firstly in St. Paul’s sense, of constructing a self-righteous idolatry. This is a pastoral issue to which congregations who gather round those in grief ought to be alert. And it is a political issue for a nation that would justify the next round of military build-up, continuing construction of the largest war machine on the planet. In fact, our congregations must recognize that the political maneuver provokes a pastoral crisis of major proportion. When nations intervene, manipulating grief, they offer idolatrous, nationalistic, vengeful substitutions for the grace of God and true community. They preempt the forgiving love of the Gospel.

As the South Africans have taught us so well, reconciliation and forgiveness require truth. But if recent days are any measure, the truth would stun many Americans. For most, the innocence of victims is one with the innocence of the nation. And yet it must be said that the U.S. has been pioneer and master of targeting civilians. Be it instruments of mass destruction or antipersonnel weaponry or the slow terrors of low-intensity warfare. From Hiroshima to Vietnam to the contra war in Nicaragua to the infrastructure bombing of Iraq, and more, civilians have been not merely "collateral damage" but target. The question is: Can we look on the rubble of Manhattan and see Baghdad or Beirut or Ramallah? Do the eyes of our heart open or close?

There is likewise the truth of Osama bin Laden – and others like him – trained and supported and used by the CIA in the Afghan war against the Soviets. When we reap the whirlwind, do we see what we have sown?

And this barely begins to touch on the truth of the global economy, for which the Trade Towers were both a literal and symbolic headquarters. How to even evoke this gathering system, which excludes and crushes the poor, strip-mines culture and assaults the earth.

The image of the falling towers, played over and over, has been quite literally apocalyptic. It even prompts certain fundamentalists, with their concomitant dualisms and judgments, to claim the will of God, and see endtime signs. Apocalyptic, of course, is not about timelines, but truth. Apocalypse means "revelation," means "unveiling," means pulling aside the curtain of delusions that cover history’s meaning. We do, indeed, need to look deep in reading this sign of the times.

I’ve been led to think on the apocalyptic dream of Daniel 2. There the towering imperial image of gold and bronze and iron is overwhelmingly strong and glorious above, but it’s got to stand somewhere and what it stands upon is actually its vulnerability. Clay feet. If it doesn’t stand on a foundation of justice it’s vulnerable even to collapse. In the dream it crashes down like this heaving emblem in history. Such an image raises the question: What are we actually standing on? What is the real source of our continuing vulnerability? Is it inadequate security machinery and inadequate military power, or is it inadequate justice?

If a Word of hope is in the rubble it may be the choice clearly put: Will we sow yet again the whirlwind or lay with our lives a new foundation?
– Bill Wylie-Kellermann (An earlier version of this piece appeared in Sojourners, www.sojo.net.)

War is not a game
Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies. They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue." Now is not the time for more understanding – just better intelligence. These are the rules of the war game.

Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: War is not a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, each with a dignified story. This act of terror was reality of the harshest kind, an act that makes all other acts seem suddenly frivolous, game-like.

It’s true: War is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps it will never again be treated as one. Perhaps Sept. 11, 2001, will mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war. Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings exploding over and over again, we saw only sterile bomb’s-eye views of concrete targets – there and then gone. Who was in these abstract polygons? We never found out.

Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around the world – in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel – without suffering any U.S. casualties. This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war.

This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely unaffected by – even uninterested in – international conflicts in which they are key protagonists. Americans don’t get daily coverage on CNN of the ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country’s children. After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for a chemical weapons facility), there weren’t too many follow-up reports about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the region.

And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo – including markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains and a TV station – NBC didn’t do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they were by the indiscriminate destruction.

The U.S. has become expert in the art of sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no longer a national obsession, it’s a business that is now largely outsourced to experts. This is one of the country’s many paradoxes: Though the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward looking, less worldly. ...

Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has woken up in the middle of a war, only to find out the war has been going on for years.

Did the U.S. deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That suggestion is ugly and dangerous. But here’s a different question that must be asked: Did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism but on perceived U.S. imperviousness?
– Naomi Klein, http://www.inthesetimes.com

No technical solution
We must hold, as if to life itself, to a fundamental truth that has been known to all thoughtful people since the destruction of Hiroshima: There is no technical solution to the vulnerability of modern populations to weapons of mass destruction. ... It is to politics that we must return for the solutions that hold promise. That means returning to the treaties that the U.S. has recently been discarding like so much old newspaper – the one dealing, for example with an International Criminal Court (useful for tracking down terrorists and bringing them to justice), with global warming and, above all, with nuclear arms and the other weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. The U.S. and seven other countries now rely for their national security on the retaliatory execution of destruction a millionfold greater than the Tuesday attacks. The exit from this folly, by which we endanger ourselves as much as others, must be found.
– Jonathan Schell, The Nation, 10/1/01

For more commentary on the September 11 attacks, see <www.thewitness.org/agw>.