Spring 2002
Six Months Later: What Have We Learned?
By Jaan E. Vaino, Columbia U. ’83
It’s been more than six months now since terrorists turned New York’s twin towers into pillars of fierce fire and smoke. We’ve lived through six months of war and rumors of war, six months wondering whether that nightmare morning delivered an era of trouble, or just one terrible jolt. We’re calmer now; it’s a good time to ask ourselves some questions.
“Is it over?” Few of us think so.
“What happens next?” None of us knows.
“What have we learned?” Some pretty obvious things; others that require more reflection.
But what if we ask, “What message from September 11th do we dare not miss? What failure to learn now would haunt us forever?” One overriding urgency overshadows all the others.
What We Know—or Should Know
If nothing else, we know that someone hates people just like you and me enough to come halfway across the world to kill us. You or I might have fallen at the World Trade Center that morning. More than 120 Ivy League alumni died there, according to university web sites. Many more escaped or fled the rumblings nearby.
We’ve learned that our cities and homes aren’t exempt from what shakes the rest of the world. Our prosperous economy is vulnerable too. Would a larger blow have brought deeper and longer-lasting damage?
We know that we have to pay better attention to people who threaten us. Our murderers had been telling us their plans for years.
Steven Emerson’s 1994 PBS documentary, Jihad in America, shows extremist clerics and traveling mujahadeen recruiters addressing Jihad-promoting rallies in the United States, boldly urging acts of terror against this country and its interests in the starkest terms.
And their holy terror was not just talk:
In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed, killing 252, injuring over 5,000.
In October, 2000, suicide bombers blew a 40-foot hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden, killing 17 of its crew, wounding 39.
More than anything else, the failed 1993 attempt to bring down One World Trade Center with a basement truck bomb made it clear that eight years before September 11, 2001, terror already was in full motion against us. It just had not yet succeeded within our shores, and we thought we were safe.
We should know that the people who brought us September 11th aren’t gone. Will they make another strike? They intend to—and a worse one.
An individual who identified himself as formerly associated with Osama Bin Laden told CBS News in no disapproving way that an attack is planned in which 100,000 Americans will die on a single day. He asserted that this will be easily carried out when the striking hour comes, and will wake us up to the realities and designs of “Holy War.”
Other terrorist leaders have declared their unattainable desire to wipe out what they call “the Great Satan” by slaughtering us in the largest numbers they possibly can. That they intend nothing less, and that they are aliens to all mercy, ought by now to be as plain as the sun at Noon on a cloudless day—except, of course, to the willfully or naively blind.
We should understand that action—not talk, not “minding our own business”—holds some real promise of protection. If we fail to act effectively, and another disaster strikes, we will blame our leaders—and anyone else we can find—relentlessly. We should understand that the wicked won’t leave us alone out of mercy. They will fail if God spares us and we do everything we must.
Between the first and second World Wars, generous American loans, British revulsion at the thought of another war, and Allied laissez-faire treaty enforcement encouraged Nazi Germany’s hell-bent preparation of a war machine.
Sir Winston Churchill looked back on the Second World War as a most preventable horror. He chose this theme for The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of that war:
“How the English-speaking peoples
through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature,
allowed the wicked to re-arm.”
We’re reminded forcibly now that a primary responsibility of government is to protect citizens’ lives. The public servants who put our lives before theirs on the dreadful morning of September 11th are our new heroes. In the words of history’s greatest public servant, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” It’s high time our children had better heroes than rock idols and sports megastars.
Ground Zero for Post-Modern Muddlethink?
Some of last September’s lessons aren’t quite as obvious.
We should agree that it’s time to throw our relativistic, post-modern models of the world on the first heap we can find. Their kind of thinking doesn’t even have a word for the seething evil every American’s gut saw blazing above Ground Zero. A view of the world—including ourselves—that won’t call a noble thing good and an evil thing wicked is worse than a clever think-tank toy. Trotted out into a real world, it can betray real people.
We can at least ask what direction, what help, what comfort we can possibly find now in thinking that explains what struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Afghanistan as a clash of contrary “mythic systems!”
It will not do—to pick one glaring example—to dismiss the Taliban regime’s multiplied atrocities against women as merely an expression of their cultural uniqueness. Women lived under male dominance of the heaviest order—systematic repression, reaching torture, sometimes for momentary infractions of absurdly imposed rules of conduct. Women were forbidden to engage in work outside their homes, even when abandoned by their husbands and left with children to feed. They were barred from teaching music to children because music was banned by that joyless regime.
Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry, the two Americans imprisoned in Afghanistan, reported repeatedly hearing the screams of women being beaten by guards.
No, there is no theorizing possible about this kind of treatment. We must call it what it plainly is—cruel beyond measure, and evil.
In his New York Times Op-Ed column on September 25, 2001 Thomas Friedman wrote, “It was not our intelligence that failed us on September 11th, it was our imagination that failed us.” Imagination starved of the admiration of real good, and equally starved of the comprehension and repudiation of real evil, is too weak to resist wickedness. We are blamable for our failure to imagine September 11th—though we had ample reason to expect it—and for our failure to prepare for it.
A Bogus Enemy
In another column, “The Real War” (The New York Times, November 27, 2001), Friedman advances the fashionable—and appropriately simplistic—notion that today’s real global enemy is “fundamentalist” religion. (By the way, does that include Marxism?) Quoting a rabbi who suggests that “God is not exhausted by just one faith,” he, like not a few others, proposes that we draw the battle lines boldly between folks who profess definite beliefs about God and truth on the one hand, and others who give voice to an emerging civic religion of universalist pantheism. Its essential doctrine suggests that it is offensive to assert that religious truth lies anywhere in particular; one apparently must moosh a spectrum of acceptable religions together to assemble a whole truth.
The logical outcome of this proliferating outlook is the death-knell of the American pluralist experiment, where parties with differing—and definite—beliefs nevertheless have collaborated to build a strong and robust society.
We must understand that our struggle is not against people with definite and strongly-held religious beliefs, not against people who believe in real and exclusive truths—but against real evil, real murder. If we will not dare to make judgments that condemn real evil, we will end in deep division, defining and fighting one another as the Enemy.
The sins we have come to denounce most are, apparently, those that exploit our differences: racism, discrimination, the imposition on a minority of majority beliefs. Is an unintended mutation of the past century’s civil and human rights struggles a drive to erase the recognition of differences generally? The past fifty years have seen sweeping re-alignments in every facet of society, including the workplace, the academy, government, media, and the bedroom—erasing differences of all sorts that once governed these arenas.
Having been trained to avoid making judgments about people, their behavior and their thinking, we need to learn to make some such judgments all over again. When real good and real evil are treated “even-handedly,” truth soon lies slain in the streets.
Has Anyone Sighted Something Really Good Lately?
Yet more telling of a nation’s health than its willingness to call an evil thing evil is its courage to stand on what it holds to be good, and to rally others to it.
America’s founders, in their bold and brilliant Declaration of Independence, held that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Could that document—making so unequivocal an assertion about God and fundamental truths—be written by Americans today?
As a cornerstone of the free society they set out to establish, those men staked all on what they held in common to be an indisputable truth. Absent that kind of bedrock, assertions of human rights, no matter how noble, must soon disintegrate. If people of every race, creed, and station do not derive their equality and worth from the God who made them in His own image, where can they find it? Who will uphold their rights when they are threatened? Rights always must be guaranteed by someone.
The “rights” found in a world disconnected from God consist only of concessions negotiated, wrested, or bought from others. Such privileges are captive to the whim of their grantors, subject to the relative might of the parties to them, liable to disappear when someone feels strong enough or bold enough to revoke them. For many, yes, for millions, where God’s authority is not acknowledged, justice is nowhere to be found.
It’s no wonder that many academic discussions of politics, diplomacy, sociology, and human rights center on the analysis of power relationships. The dominant party generally is presumed a priori an oppressor; morality and justice are discounted in the absolute and are afforded meaning only in the grammar of power and oppression. Without God, and without definable good, what else is there to talk about?
Our freedom always has stood on the conviction that people should be treated fairly and justly, and that the people’s participation in public life is to be prized. It has been our consensus that these principles are absolutely good, and that they apply universally. They’re absolutely good for a reason—because they are found in the nature of God Himself. This is the way He treats us, and it defines the way He expects us to treat one another.
The bottom line: far from living in moral neutrality, where no one can claim the temerity to assert what is fundamentally good, we Americans have been blessed with one of the best and most envied treasures on earth—and our founders dared to go as far as to plainly assert what its Source is.
What difference does that make right now? For starters, it reminds us where we came from and what we’ve stood for—at a time when an enemy warns that we’re finished, fit only for annihilation.
We’ve discounted much of what we used to believe. It’s not too late to reclaim. But patriotism and military action alone won’t restore what we have too easily allowed to ebb away. Liberty and strength can be gotten only from the God whose they are to give.
And that leads us to the heart of last September’s message.
The One Thing We Must Learn
More than any of the scores of issues debated endlessly since the first hijacked plane exploded on September 11th, one overwhelming lesson must emerge from the rubble of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Afghanistan. The entire matter can be packaged in a single question:
Would you have been ready for the morning of September 11, 2001, to have been your last?
Even the youngest and strongest found no exemption from their mortality that morning. You and I have no better guarantee than theirs.
Not one issue in your life—not one responsibility, glittering opportunity, or urgency demands more immediate attention. If you ignore it, or defer the consideration it deserves, you embrace the same peril that trapped that morning’s victims.
Emergencies are not generally announced with alarms; most arrive quietly and proceed unnoticed until they defy denial. But the message of September 11th rings like a five-alarm fire.
Yet who possibly could have been ready for that, you ask? That day’s events overtook its victims; no preparation was possible. But—some were, in truth, ready.
Todd Beamer, now the well-known hero of hijacked United Flight 93, was ready to act and, if necessary, to die. That fact was clear in his last overheard words: his prayer for mercy for the hijackers, the Lord’s Prayer and his famous “Let’s roll!”
Evidently having come to terms with his God, he found assurance in Jesus’ sacrificially-purchased promise of eternal life—assurance enough to take on the terrorist hijackers. As we all know, Beamer and his companions brought the plane down short of the hijackers’ target. No man should ever have to make the decision he did—but other Americans likely owe their lives to Todd Beamer today.
A singular reality prevails among men and women who live by their faith in Christ—people who are not Christians culturally or sentimentally, but have made a decisive transaction on the basis of Christ’s death and resurrection for them: those Christians are prepared to die.
Such Christians do not choose death, but because they have settled the great issue that makes most men dread their coming last days, they can live without fear. They know—better than they know anything—that God has made peace with them through Christ, and that death, in its time, will only serve as their direct conveyance into never-ending life with him. The Christian can turn to what he once dreaded and ask, “Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory?” I Corinthians 15:55.
It turns out that in Jesus’ day too, a prominent tower made headlines when it fell, tragically killing innocent people. Jesus asked: “[T]hose eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Luke 13:4–5.
Here lies the urgency. No one—not you, nor I, nor anyone—can tell which day will be our last. Every day spent without assurance of peace with God is a day spent under a sword.
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” John 3:19–21.
God does not share our reticence in plainly calling evil evil. And more to the point, He points relentlessly to its root—not in the monstrous face of an easily-identified political oppressor, but in every man’s own diseased heart. But wonderfully, the God who will not let us theorize away the sin of our own hearts is not like us: He does not despise us for the evil He finds there. In spite of it, God offers us—generously, freely, and without reproach—amnesty, reconciliation, His own warm friendship, and eternal life:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned . . . .” John 3:16–18a.
God has taken pains for centuries to send His summons to repentance and saving faith throughout the world. Paul, the first-century scholar and apostle of Christ, delivered this message to the learned philosophers of ancient Athens:
“In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” Acts 17:30–31.
We are living today in a calm after the storm of September 11, 2001. It may well prove a calm before a worse storm. The Bible plainly warns of many such storms ahead. If you find that God has given you grace to understand your own need to come to terms with Him and to secure your soul’s future, there is no need to wait; you can transact with Him now and gain the assurance of forgiveness, reconciliation, and eternal life. One simple action well within your reach, as God helps you, will secure the transaction. Jesus says:
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20.
You hear him. The key lies on your side of the door, so use it. Say, “Welcome Lord, please do come in! I receive you now as my Savior.”
Jesus will act upon your action, beginning right away to effect a transformation of your life. You will find Him anything but the difficult, demanding, stress-inducing critic you may have feared, but a generous, vivifying friend, a tremendous and unexpected relief. You will wonder how you could have waited so long!
With Jesus, you will be prepared to meet fearlessly all that the future brings, with whatever force or surprise it may arrive.
God is our refuge and strength,
though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea. Psalm 46:1-2
Jaan E. Vaino, Columbia U., ’83