September 11th Revisited on the Fourth of July

a speech delivered on July 4th, 2002

Today as we gather to celebrate yet another anniversary of the birth of America as a free and independent nation, I'd like to take just a few moments to introduce you to another kind of birth, a BirthQuake. A BirthQuake is a transformational process that is triggered by significant challenges in our lives, or what I call quakes.  Much like childbirth, quakes involve both the pain of labor, and the magic of delivery, and links beginnings with endings, as all births invariably do.

Beginning with the first tremors of the quake, we are ushered into an uncertain and often perilous time, a time "when everything is rocked and shifted, when our foundations crack, and treasures lie buried beneath the rubble."

On September 11th, 2001, we confronted a collective quake, one that shook the very foundation of our nation. It brought our mighty towers down, and left 2,650 of our brothers and sisters entombed beneath the ruins. And while the debris is cleared away now, some of us are still haunted by the images of crashing planes, erupting flames, the faces of terror, smoke and ashes...

On that day began the transformation of our nation. Our sense of safety has been shattered, some of our most basic assumptions have been brought into question, and the myth that we are independent and separate from the rest of the world has been brutally exposed as the fantasy that it has always been.

Without warning we found ourselves confronted with new realities, and old issues that had long been ignored by those of us caught up in the details of our lives. On September 11th, time came as close to standing still as possible in a country where "hurry up," and "get moving" are just about as common as any term of endearment I can think of. On that autumn day, the wheels of our great machine came to a grinding halt, and in the spaces between then and now, many of us have begun to look at our country and ourselves more closely.

Some say the world didn't change on September 11th, that it's still the same old deeply troubled and equally beautiful place - perhaps that is true, but I have changed. The pain, the suffering, and the terror that has plagued so much of my planet has become much harder for me to ignore. My ongoing quest to be a good mother, wife, therapist, daughter, friend, and American becomes overshadowed from time to time now by unsettling questions. What are my responsibilities as a world citizen? How would I need to live my life differently if I committed to living up to these responsibilities? What would I need to give up? Is it possible to be a worthy child of God If I turn away from the suffering of God's other children?

How should I respond to the terrible fact that the number of war deaths in the world are increasing at astounding rates? What is my responsibility to the estimated 40,000 children who die every single day from starvation and poverty as a citizen of a country that makes up roughly only 5 % of the world's population and yet consumes more than 30% of its' total resources, and recently declared obesity as a national epidemic? And how will I manage to effectively silence my clamoring voice of conscience if I choose to not make changes in response to the answers to these questions?

The world that I live in may be the same world that it was on September 10th, 2001, but today I see myself, and it, differently. Strangely, even my sense of the past has somehow been altered.

There are many images from the world trade center attack that are still vivid in my memory. One is a picture of a terrified dark haired little boy in a striped shirt running away from the flaming towers, screaming. The first time I saw that picture, another far older and more famous image came vividly back into focus for me, that of a frail and tiny Vietnamese girl running in terror from Napalm. Today those two children, both worlds and decades apart, will be forever juxtaposed in my memory, a brutal reminder that the location of the ground where desperate children flee, or dead babies lie, is completely irrelevant. Their agony is unspeakably tragic no matter where it exists, only now, for the first time in our privileged lives; our generation of Americans saw the horrible mask of war on the faces of our own children.

Today, while I am beginning to hold my country more accountable, I have also come to love it more fiercely. It may very well be true that we are a nation in crisis, housed on a planet in peril. Yet it was in the very midst of conflict and danger that a triumphant people of the newly formed United States declared to the world that, "out of the unity from many, a new order of the ages is born."

Over a quarter of a century ago Rollo May observed, "...we are living in a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born." He urged us not to panic or withdraw in apathy as we witnessed foundations crumbling all around us, but for each of us to have the courage to participate in our own way, however modest, in the creation of a better world.

Less than a week after September 11th Kathy Amsden and I sat in her office, aching to do something, anything to ease the overwhelming grief that had not only invaded our own hearts, but had us completely surrounded. As we watched courageous and exhausted rescue workers pushed far beyond their physical and emotional limits repeatedly risk their own lives, the word heroism took on a far deeper meaning. We were proud of them, we were profoundly grateful, and at the same time, our hearts were breaking not only for the lost and dead, but for those living who would not abandon them.

Experts of trauma advise that the best line of defense against trauma is to take action, to do something. And so we did. We wrote a song, the first song that either of us had ever written. We wrote it for the firefighters, the police officers, and the emergency medical personnel whom we would never see in quite the same way again. They represented the very best of us, and they had the courage to confront the very worst.

I'm hoping that during this process of recovery and rebuilding we'll follow their example, that we too will have the courage to not only face what at times may seem unfaceable, but to work with their same amazing commitment to change what needs changing. Harold Goddard wrote that, "the destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories that it loves and believes in." I am hoping that the stories that we the people of the world ultimately embrace are more tolerant, wiser stories that include life, liberty and justice for all people, everywhere, and that together we might begin to love and live this old story into a new beginning.

Today, as we remember September 11th and honor our heroes, perhaps we can also envision the heroic that exists within each of us.

Tammie Fowles

Tammie Fowles is a homeschooling parent, psychotherapist, trainer, and the author of BirthQuake: A Journey to Wholeness

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Links to observations regarding September 11th:

http://www.dwcw.org/cgi/wwwbbs.cgi?Terrorist-Attack&237

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1030-07.htm (Bill Moyers)

 http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0923-03.htm  (Barbara Kingsolver)

http://www.wfs.org/esgarrison.htm (Jim Garrison)