Truth be told, for the most part, I still feel numb. This morning was the first time I had a chance to lay in bed and think about it all, and when I got up, I spent two hours with my girls watching the ABC special for children on the topic. It was the first time I cried; it was almost as if it was the first moment when I was not so concerned about others that I could let myself feel it all. Somehow, I think that the tears are going to flow a lot more in the future, as I slowly come back to feeling. Part of me is still in armor, fearing the list of those who died, wondering who will appear on it -- political comrades, work colleagues, former students.
Everybody is dealing with this differently. Winsome and Sandia were in the car with me, close to the WTC when it fell. Winsome says she believed she was going to die, and she is filled with immense anger. But she goes between talking about the how bin Laden and anyone connected to him should die with maximum pain and singing "We Shall Overcome," and she has just taken the girls to see the shrines to the dead in Union Square. I would pity the person who told her [she is Jamaican, and like the rest of us in NYC, sees the signs with the faces of missing people from every corner of the globe -- subways station entrances are becoming the sites of murals of these little posters and of poems and open letters] what I read here on this list: that it is racist to reject Chomsky's obscene claim that the bombing of the factory in Sudan, with one death, is a greater crime than the deliberate, calculated murders of thousands upon thousands New Yorkers from around the world.
It is hard to know how Sandia is processing it. Last night, she is playing with a toy dragon, telling me it is "traumatized." I smiled for the first time in days at the way she had picked up that word, and asked her if she knew what it meant. She answers no. Well, I said, it is when you have a very difficult, very scary, very hurting experience. She says, you mean like Tuesday? Yes, I say. Well, then she decides she is going to "detraumatize" it with medicine in a make believe needle. She is going around with her imaginary needle, detraumnatizing everything -- including me. I wish it were as easy to detraumatize her.
Some images and thoughts stick in my mind. I can't shake the fact that the collapse of the WTC was so powerful that it pulverized everything in those buildings, that it made half of the gypsum, concrete and steel in the buildings -- and what is obvious, but what no one says, the human bodies -- into a heavy ash which now covers lower Manhattan. Having been completely immersed in that falling ash for five minutes, so immersed that one could not see a thing, feels to me like having undergone a baptism of sorts, as if the spirits of those massacred souls somehow went into me. I don't know what to make of that, don't know if it is rational or irrational, don't know why an old agnostic who thinks in terms of logic is suddenly filled with these spiritual feelings. I think that it has a lot to do with why I react so strongly to the desecration of their memorizes with callous "contextualization" meant to minimize the gravity of these murderous deeds, with loose talk of "chickens coming home to roost" which suggests that there is a justification for such a crime, with pathological nonsense about how it was a blow against American imperialism. If I am able to do nothing else with respect to this crime, I will challenge such desecration everywhere I hear it or read it. And when I think of the people I know, like the five staff members of my children's school who have lost loved ones in the WTC, the people who are not now able to respond to such desecration of their loved ones, but still caught holding on to a fading hope that they will be found, I am intent that a voice be raised on their behalf here.
I read here that such challenges on my part and on the part of others mark us as 'liberals,' performing our roles of restricting radical discourse by 'bullying' those who would speak of an equivalence between destroying an empty factory and destroying buildings with over 50,000 people in them. David, do not worry for me for being described in these terms. When you have spent the better part of your life struggling to make your government do the right thing, here and abroad, this sort of characterization is something you come to expect, even at a time like this. I can only think of a paraphrase of a saying of Mike Quill, the crusty old Irish leader of NYC subway and bus workers and one time red: "I would rather be a liberal to those who diminish horrific mass murder, than someone who diminishes horrific mass murder to the liberals." There is an incredibly revealing parallel between these comments, putatively from the left, and the words of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, that it was the godless liberalism of NYC and the US, the driving of God from our schools, our protections for the right to choose an abortion and the right to be gay or lesbian, our civil liberties in general, which caused an avenging God to allow these murderous deeds to take place.
When I see American flags everywhere these past few days, and when my own girls decide that they want to put them up in our windows, I remember the wise words of Norman Thomas at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement: the appropriate gesture, he said then, was to wash, not to burn, the American flag. I think of it because, in many ways, I have never been prouder of being an American from New York City. The incredible selflessness, the efforts to help, even at the risk of one's own life, the insistence that we are a diverse people, and that we will not scapegoat Arab and Moslem New Yorkers: I can think of no other city in which I would rather be a citizen. When I turned on the television this morning and see channel after channel with the young people of the city in all their diversity, including Arab-American young people; when the discussion again and again focused on the need not to scapegoat and hate, but to embrace all New Yorkers; when I work with teachers, union staff and Board of Education officials who have, as their primary concern, not simply the provision of buildings to displaced schools, but the promotion of understanding and the diminishment of hatred among NYC's public school students, I am so grateful that I am a part of this city. The very things that the terrorists and the Falwells and Robertsons hate about NYC -- its international character, its openness to and tolerance of all, from every race, nation, religion and sexual orientation, its freedom -- is what I love.
What is so distressing about the flag burning sort of reaction from the left at a time like this, as Nathan pointed out on the DSA list, is that it shows an incredible alienation from the ordinary people, the working men and women of America. Like the Falwells and the Robertsons, they are so alienated from the American people, that they can see no good, only evil, in us. They must find a way to justify every evil deed done to us, no matter how monstrous, to place responsibility for it on us, and to deny any good in us or our actions. They have lost sight of what the struggle for human emancipation from violence, suffering and oppression is all about, and become apologists for its opposite. They are no comrades of mine.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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