Sifting the Rubble of 9/11
As the dust begins to settle over Manhattan, our thoughts and emotions still struggle to settle on any meaningful resolution. For almost two weeks, most of the remains of the twin towers have stood where they fell, as a macabre, smoking monument to a wounded nation and a hurting world.
The gaping hole in the Manhattan skyline is somehow symbolic of the space that most people still need to grieve in these most perplexing of days.
Historians may well conclude that the 21st century began on the 11th September 2001. How foolish we were to express a sense of anti-climax as the second millennium AD so undramatically became the third! As Douglas Coupland says in his latest novel, 'The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of the world.' We are bored no longer; and would that we might return to the humdrum of the new world order.
Any collective optimism now lies buried deep in rubble, and the events we witnessed will cast a long, dark shadow over the century. Most will recall with clarity the day they watched the first globally televised disaster happen in 'real' time. And some of us might still wrestle with the sense of shame we felt in gorging ourselves on images of 'real' people jumping out of windows.
A shift of emphasis has now occurred, and while grief will linger like the whiff of death, the talk has turned to war. To a battle between good and evil. To retribution and revenge. It's understandable, and most people - in the Western world, at least - crave swift justice.
Christians, however, might pray that Clare Short's plea for restraint might be heard by Blair and Bush. A pause between grief and action would be no bad thing. For a start, the greater the preparation, perhaps the less human 'collateral damage' will be inflicted.
But if the West really wishes to make this a holy war - a battle between right and wrong, as Bush has been so keen to emphasise - an appropriate Christian response should be to wait. To wait on God, in whom we should trust. And truly to lament. A terrible thing has happened in the world; and we would do well, in time, to ask why. Before all hell breaks loose.
Brian Draper
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