Cell Phones Ringing in the Pockets of the Dead

In the interests of full disclosure, I'll note the title today is a theft from Willie Nile.

I'm old enough to remember where I was when I learned the President, John F. Kennedy, had been murdered in Dallas, Texas. I can see it very clearly, still--basement classroom, row closest to the door, fifth seat back, staring up at the loudspeaker on the wall where the morning announcements usually emanated, utterly bewildered by the words Sister Immaculata, the principal, was speaking. It was English, but I didn't really understand. Even days later as the caissons rolled by and the riderless horse with the boots backwards in the stirrups and John-John's salute, it was still sinking in.

I can also remember where I was today seven years ago-at my desk, at work and someone popped in to say 'a plane has hit the World Trade Center' and my first thought was he meant a small prop plane, like a Piper Cub. I went to the Web, as it turned out half the people on earth were also doing, and had trouble getting into any of the news sites I visited on a regular basis because their servers were buckling under the volume of traffic.

They weren't the only thing buckling, as by the time I made my way upstairs to a staff lounge where a television with cable was located, one of the towers was less than an hour away from following suit, though none of us knew that. The TV talking heads were scrambling to get seated and explain to us what had happened, as the why wasn't yet known. Someone had gotten hold of the accidental video of one of the jumbo jets (I was numbed, looking at the size of the plane) going into one of the towers, simply being swallowed up, and NOT coming out the other side. I'm not linking to the thousands of sites that have it-ALL of us need to remember it, and NONE of us ever need to see it again.

This clip ran, it felt like, for days, as analysts took it apart a frame at a time. Technical note: in US broadcasting, NTSC (never twice the same color as we always called it to the anger and chagrin of engineers), 30 frames of video are recorded per second (half the cycle rate of alternating current in our power grid) at 525 lines of horizontal scan. Western Europeans use a higher scan rate, 625 at 25 frames a second (same reason why ours is 30) and the audio is recorded at a different place electronically, making the two systems incompatible with one another. I read where the news director at ABC, at the request of the late Peter Jennings who anchored three days of non-stop coverage, STOPPED showing the clip because he feared the impact it was having on viewers. Too late for me and many more like me.

In a flash, NYC (and Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania) became everyday in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In Fortress America, with our oceans and armed forces to protect us, we had watched for years as violence became an everyday occurrence in Israel, in Sri Lanka, in the Philippines and elsewhere. It hadn't really touched us. Yes, there had been the murder of the Marines in Beirut in the Eighties, the explosions that killed people at the embassy in Africa and the destruction of Khobar Towers and the death of American airmen, but all of those were television news stories.

We paused, watched for a moment, and then changed the channel. We weren't stupid or unfeeling, just distracted by modern life. We understood, at least in the abstract, that terrorists are people who have nothing to live for, but we failed to grasp that people who have nothing to live for will always find something to die for. And then they want you to die for it, too. I am not the brightest bulb in the lamp, so I may not have been the first one to recognize the worldview the maniac cowards halfway across the globe constructed to rationalize murdering thousands of innocent people because they were, in some obscure way, responsible for creating everything the hate-filled crazies despised and feared.

More than two towers of concrete, glass and steel fell that day and more than hundreds of hopeless people hurled themselves from windows in those towers to certain death on the streets below rather than perish in the inferno and carnage that only a fully-fueled commercial passenger jet creates when it crashes into a building. The only opportunity left to behave like the sentient creatures we all believe ourselves to be, the Crown of Creation (no matter how you envision the Creator), and to attempt as a species to find political solutions to questions of homeland, heritage and personal liberties disappeared, perhaps forever, in the dust and debris of that day.

Many people died trying to save many other people and we remember them on this day as heroes because of that sacrifice. Maybe what we should remember is more the reason why they rushed in to save those who were overtaken by the calamity and the chaos. I think they died believing they were making a difference in trying to help if but only one other person. And because of the willingness that each showed in giving of their life to attempt that, at least for today, I think we owe them, and ourselves, another opportunity to work for peaceful and just resolutions to all the challenges facing all of us on the Big, Blue Marble in the 21st Century.

Hey, those who hate and exult in your hatred, don't get lost in the noise. It's not, nor ever been, "My God can beat up your God." As Voltaire noted, without man there is no God. Here's the real lesson: Anything worth dying for is worth living for. One day at a time, no matter how sad remembering that day is, or how painful that memory will always be. Through the tears, across the years and despite the fears, we will always triumph-to do less would betray and dishonor the memory of all, before and since, who sacrificed so much for us to be here now. And being here now, is the Soul of America.
-bill kenny