Two years ago today I was sitting in my office when my assistant informed me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Like others, I had assumed that a small turbo-prop or commuter jet, with an inexperienced pilot at the controls, caused the accident. I crawled under my desk to plug in my Ethernet connection to see what the NY Times had to say about it. When I couldn't get on the NY Times website or CNN's, I turned on the radio on my desk. Needless to say, it was in the next few moments that I realized a history altering event had occured. A commericial jet? How could that be? Those planes have all sorts of equipment on-board to prevent such an occurence, I thought to myself. As I listened to the new, the reporter gasped and annouced that a 2nd plane just crashed into the other tower. With that, suddenly everything made sense.
I gathered my things and called my wife while running to the parking lot. She travelled to New York City on business quite frequently, usually just for the day, and didn't always let me know. I prayed as I dialed the numbers. Luckily, she was in Boston. I told her what happened and that I was going to pick up the children from school and that she should come home.
I picked up the kids and prayed again for their well-being ( I prayed alot that day). The kids were laughing, elated about the early pick-up. I think they envisioned a day at the park ending with a chocolate dipped ice-cream. I took them home and then called the rest of my family members. I turned on the television and watched the terrifying images. The smoke. The people standing by the broken windows shook me. I prayed for them. I tried to imagine myself in their position. You could tell they knew this was the end. They stared out the windows. Some of them took control of their fate and jumped. I prayed for their families.
For me, this second annniversary feels raw. The first anniversary was filled with speeches and ceremonies. Today, is more stark. And, in many ways more terrifying. Thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the September 11th attacks, I remembered Rudyard Kipling's line about WW I:
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o'erthrown.
The other image I can't forget is of the people dancing in the street celebrating the attacks. I wondered about these people rapturously celebrating death. I know of no God that sanctifies the taking of life. This went beyond religion. This went to first principles of the the sociological, ideological, psychological, economical, and anthropological roots of human society. As a social scientist, I can't believe that all those who danced are simply "evil". There were women, children, the old, and young. To seem them as evil is too simplistic. It is too banal. It ignores the established fact that ordinary people under certain conditions can be extraordinarily inhumane. I think one thing that the Stanford Prison Experiments and the Yale electric shock experiments made clear is that under the right conditions ordinary people can become not only immoral, but sadistic. To simply categorize people or behaviors as evil runs the risk of seeing such actions as epiphenomenal and their actions as governed by some supernatural force that can neither be controlled or influenced or mitigated. I don't know the way forward, but I don't think this current road is going to take us where we need to go as a society, a civilization, and a people.
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