Several weeks ago, Rev. Bonnie at our church gave a sermon about how we deal with bad things that happen to us. She related it to some bad things in…
Several weeks ago, Rev. Bonnie at our church gave a sermon about how we deal with bad things that happen to us. She related it to some bad things in her own life, about which I needn’t go into detail, but she summed it up as one of three choices we have:
- We can be a victim. We can let it break us, we can even find some horrifying familiarity in such circumstances, and keep putting ourselves into that situation over and over again. The bad things become the model for our lives.
- We can be a survivor. We can learn the lessons of the bad things, and make sure that they don’t happen to us again. The bad things become the touchstone of our lives, in our reaction to them.
- We can live. We can acknowledge the bad things, deal with them, make sure they don’t happen again … and then move on.
Like any generalization, this is a generalization. But it made me think about our current crisis.
Around us, we see flags flying, and stickers and banners and TV ghosts and half-time shows and pundits and politicians, all saying the same thing — Remember September 11. I guess we’ll never have a good catch phrase for those acts of terror — “9-11” seems to be as close as anyone informally uses.
But think of that. Remember September 11.
We’ve decided we won’t be victims. We aren’t going to wring our hands, acquiesce to terror, let them kick us around some more, kill more people, wail and moan and gnash our teeth and promise we won’t ever do it again, whatever “it” was.
Right now, we’re survivors. And that’s appropriate, because that’s what we are.
But is that what we always want to be?
Everyone is talking about how the whole world has changed. About how nothing will ever be the same again. About how this is a new era.
But do we forever want to identify our era, our lives, our country, based on this one act of terror?
Because we can. We can take all the other things that make up this country — our freedoms, our diversity, our creativity, our industry, our politics, our culture — and make them focus on September 11, mold them around that date, turn that date into the touchstone for everything we do from now on, for better or for worse, in acting out our anger, in acting out our fear, in acting out what it means to be us. Americans.
We cannot forget. We must not. But do we not want to do more than just survive? Should our lives really be forever fundamentally changed? Forever be a reaction to the horror of that day, to that crime or act of war or insanity or whatever we choose to call it?
I sure hope not. Things will never be the same, sure, but things are never the same as they used to be. The question is, how long will September 11 be the catalyst for change, and how deeply will we let that change penetrate, and how far from how we used to be will we let ourselves become — and how open will we be to the next change, perhaps not one of terror or hatred or blood.
Fifty years from now, or one hundred, I expect that history books will mark September 11 as a major event in US history, if not world history. But I sure hope that there are other events that happen in the years to come — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for five years, or even a decade — that historians will write about, too. Not because we shouldn’t remember, but because we need to be remembering other things, too. Not because it hasn’t changed us, but because we are not just a nation forged out of September 11, 2001, but out of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other dates, and must be into the future.
At some point we need to live.