What are we doing?
And what have we been doing since this day twenty-two years ago?
Today, September 14—a day ignored in infamy—is when President Bush went to ground zero, heard chants of USA! USA! and picked up a bullhorn to declare: “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
“I hear you calling for revenge,” the president was saying. “I hear you saying 'us' against 'them.' Soon we will answer terror with terror. Soon someone else's neighborhood will be burned to the ground. We will not turn the other cheek.”
Who is it God blesses? Oh yeah, the peacemakers.
Has America been on a blessed path since then? Has the world?
The video of planes flying into buildings on 9/11 offered the world what every preacher depends on when standing in front of congregants: a common text. Everyone on the planet watched history change in real-time.
Three days later, Mr. Bush interpreted that common text in exactly the wrong way. Or so these twenty-two years later suggest.
Comically inept when addressing the division of wealth, a planet on fire, tectonic shifts in migration, and its own broken systems, America now comes off as one more crazy country in the global hood, deaf to the pain about which it is shouting.
The world may have been ready to hear America “soon” back in 2001. Who's listening now?
Is America super now? Where is its power now?
And would those questions be as hard to answer if god had blessed the Iraq war?
Continues tomorrow . . .