There are two people I remember from September 11, 2001 and neither one of them is Rudolph Guliani. The first was a school boy named Andrew who was the person to tell me, at the school bus stop, at 9th and F, that planes had flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that the twin towers had collapsed. I knew from his eyes and the tremor in his voice that he was telling the truth. 
It seemed like a ridiculous truth. It was as perfect a late summer day here as it had been in New York, with enriched blue skies and a few mares tail clouds.
I felt sick to my stomach within a minute, and that made me think of the other person I remember from that day. The reason I thought of her is that she had invited me to speak that evening at a library in north Spokane, to talk about a recent series of articles I’d written with my reporting partner Larry Shook. I’ll be honest. I didn’t want to go, and I was almost so sure that nobody else would want to go that I almost didn’t call to confirm that we were not gathering at the library that evening.
Turns out we were. Our host, the woman who invited me and who organized the evening, was Annette Remshard, a civic activist and a nurse. Before she introduced me that evening she gave one of the most remarkable talks I’ve ever heard as she was fighting back tears. It was about the things we needed to do as Americans to be in solidarity with the people who were killed and injured that day, and their families. She concluded by saying “as Americans we still have work to do here, in Spokane,” and with that she moved the discussion to what she’d asked me to talk about.
Annette’s phrase “as Americans we still have work to do here” is as indelible to me as much as are the ghastly images from the television sets that day. It stays with me because it said to get up, to deal with it, to move on, to do what was within us to be Americans, to not just be stunned spectators and bystanders. She was right. And if it weren’t for her I would have spent that night at home, gawking, and feeling depressed, and probably drinking. As you all know, it was a beautiful day turned horrible.
The hardest question for me to inspect as a citizen is where we go after events like 9/11/01. Today I’m traveling to Pasco, and I don’t go to Pasco without thinking of Nagasaki. A year after Pearl Harbor, a good man by the name of Lt. Col. Franklin T. Matthias of the Army Corps of Engineers came to Pasco on a tour of the west. He was looking for a place to build the world’s first plutonium plant. And that’s how Hanford came into existence, as a top-secret camp of 50,000 construction workers building plutonium factories. A grapefruit-sized ball of Hanford plutonium destroyed Nagasaki even more swiftly than airplanes took down the World Trade Center. Maybe violence doesn’t always beget violence, but in a world with airplanes and plutonium you have to be concerned about what the long-term prospects for reason and peace are.
The pinnacle of reason, as a political expression, is the U.S. Constitution. To me the Constitution embodies what it is we should be working for as Americans. It’s more important than the economy. It’s more important than airport security. It’s more important even than the appearance of peace. This is because human rights and justice are the truest and most reliable foundations for peace and prosperity and, thus, security.
What deepened my depression after 9/11/01 was not the gravity of what had happened and who had done this to us, but how we, as a nation, reacted to this tragedy. Within days, Dick Cheney was telling Tim Russert on Meet the Press that we were going to have to walk on “the dark side, if you will.”
I felt then and since that the trauma of 9/11/01 filled far too many of us with a rage to get even. There’s a saying that when you’re a hammer the whole world can look like a nail. And I think we became that hammer.
To me any walk on “the dark side, if you will,” was not a walk toward the America that I wanted to live in, and raise my children in. Just wasn’t. I’m not a fundamentalist Christian but, having been raised Christian in a country dominated by Christians, I think one of Christ’s fundamental lessons is to turn away from the dark side, especially when provoked. If the Christian answer to every difficult decision is to ask one’s self what would Jesus do, it’s hard to imagine Jesus responding to 9/11/01 by authorizing preemptive wars, torture, “extraordinary rendition,” suspension of habeus corpus, indiscriminate wiretapping, etc. Maybe there’s a classified chapter of the New Testament that I haven’t been allowed access to.
I disagree with President Bush. I don’t think the cadre of terrorists who attacked us seven years ago did so because they hate our freedom. I think that’s a basic and tragic misunderstanding, and I think the rest of the world thinks much less of us because how we wrapped this silly bumper sticker around our official post-9/11 resolve.
Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking bin Laden, said this in a 2005 interview:
“I think the most basic thing for Americans to realize is that this war has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe, and everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world. Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush before Mr. Clinton — they all identified Islamic militancy as being based on the hatred of Western democracy and freedom, and that’s clearly not the case. They surely don’t like our way of life, but very few people are willing to die to keep us from having primary elections or because we have freedom of the press.”
It’s not my intent to mark this solemn occasion by opening a foreign policy debate. My brief is only that the trauma of 9/11/01 should not have undermined the most radiant of American monuments, which is our commitment to fundamental democratic ideals and to human rights and to human decency. That’s the hard and lasting work of a democracy that is open to everyone regardless of where they’re from and what they believe. It is better to be admired for our commitment to justice and human rights than it is to be feared for our willingness to walk on the dark side.
–Tim Connor
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