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Edited on Mon Sep-11-06 09:26 AM by Plaid Adder
My partner and I spent most of last evening in the basement of the parish hall of a church in Chicago washing dishes. Once a week this church runs a food kitchen for the hungry and homeless of the neighborhood, and twice a year they run it on Sunday as a "cafe," which aims to give the patrons fine food served in an environment as close to the restaurant experience as they can get it. Being essentially unskilled labor, Liza and I were stationed by very large tubs of very hot water, washing and drying the plates as fast as they came down from the dining room upstairs so that the church's limited table service could stretch to accomodate the 150-200 people who came for dinner. Washing dishes in and of itself is not exciting; but it was exciting to be part of such a large effort, working so hard with so many people who were so into the entire event. Not being one of the servers, bartenders, or greeters, I didn't see the patrons, so I don't have any way of knowing how much they enjoyed it. The idea is to give them a couple days in the year where they can feel like customers instead of charity recipients, be waited on instead of stepped on or walked past, and eat a meal that's much better than a lot of the crap you can pay for in restaurants these days. The assumption is that this will be good for them and make them happy. Thinking about it now, it strikes me as an assumption rooted in our experience as capitalists and consumers, predicated on the assumption that spending power equates to dignity. On the one hand, one could easily see how, never having gone hungry ourselves, we were all working out of a shared failure to understand what this experience would really mean to the patrons. On the other hand, most everyone we were feeding grew up in this country too. Maybe we guessed right.
The poor you will always have with you. As with many things Jesus is reported to have said, it is hard to say with certainty exactly what that means. I know one thing, though: the Bush administration so far is in no danger of disproving this particular aphorism. The experience of being hungry and homeless has not changed much since September 11, 2001, except that now the hungry and homeless have a lot more company.
A year ago we weren't going to this church. We were both raised Catholic, and this church is not a Catholic church. We go there because it has a woman pastor and because it is what they call a welcoming congregation. And the more we get to know the other people in this congregation, the more we find out that most of them have come to this church from somewhere else--for many of them, as for us, because their own church has not welcomed them. Since the last September 11, that's one change I can point to. Somehow, last spring, I got fed up once and for all with being the Vatican's punching bag, and made the decision to try to develop the side of me that responds to Christianity outside the precincts of an organization whose anointed leaders have been treating me and mine ever more foully with every passing year.
We're five years out now. We were talking to each other this morning about what September 11 has meant to us, and what I said was that I feel that the world I had expected to live in is gone now. We may eventually be able to build something better than the world as it is at this moment, but it will never be the same again. I am more than ever afraid for what it will be like for those who were born after September 11, 2001, who will not remember that this country was at one time a different place. They will not remember that torture used to be something that everyone could agree on as wrong--at least in public. They will not remember that at one time we were not at war--at least not openly. They will not remember a time when our famously cherished ideals about civil liberty, equality, freedom, and the rule of law had not been disastrously undermined by our federal government and abandoned, in most cases without much fuss, by its terrified constituents. It will seem normal to them that the man appointed by our President to enforce the law within the United States got the job by folding, spindling, and mutilating the Constitution until the words "cruel and unusual punishment" had been defaced beyond recognition. It will seem normal to them that the President can sign a bill into law while at the same time reserving his right to effectively cancel it at his pleasure. It will seem normal to them that there is no distinction between suspicion and conviction, that anyone who is fingered by our government as a potential terrorist--however flimsy, nonexistent, or "secret" the evidence--instantly loses their human and legal rights and must submit to being treated like an animal, in Guantanamo Bay or in any "secret facility" to which it pleases the government or the military to send him. It will seem normal to them to approach everything from fear, to fear vulnerability more than they love liberty, to embrace the phantom of security no matter what dark magic had to be done to raise it.
Five years later, though, we know that even this is not the worst. Hurricane Katrina showed us what this country looks like as a sinking ship. Bombings around the world, from London to Mumbai to Iraq, and Iraq, and Iraq, and Iraq, have shown us how much of the rest of the world is involved with our struggle forward from September 11. So much depends, inside and outside our borders, on whether we will ever find somewhere good to get to. Looking back over the five years that separate the day when the world I was living in passed away and the time I am living through now, it is harder and harder to see how the path from 9/11 is going to take us anywhere better than this.
Of the members of my family, my Republican brother was the most directly affected by September 11, 2001; he worked in New York City in the financial industry at the time, and for the weeks and months afterwards was dealing with the shock waves on a daily basis. One of the people who died in the World Trade Center was a friend of his from the neighborhood we grew up in. He was working for Cantor Fitzgerald the morning the planes hit the towers. Cantor Fitzgerald's offices were above the level where the plane hit. Everyone who was in Cantor Fitzgerald's office that morning died.
My brother is getting married very soon. Though it looks like I will, at this rate, never be able to marry, I am happy for him; knowing how much it has meant to me to be with the right person, I have been waiting a long time for it to happen to him. I have spent most of my scant free time in the past couple of weeks working on a slide show for his rehearsal dinner. One of the pictures in it goes with a joke about how we have always had different politics. It shows my brother, at age five or six, dressed in a camouflage outfit with helmet holding a toy rifle cocked and pointed at the camera. I am next to him, at age three or four, wearing a nurse's outfit with a little white cap with a red cross on it. There we are, two kids playing dress-up in an affluent suburb at the end of the Vietnam War; he's getting ready to open fire an imaginary enemy, and I'm getting ready to go out and bandage up the imaginary casualties.
The world survives, but it is not the same world. Life goes on, but it is not the same life. Children are playing games now that we don't know about. We don't know, either, what they will be like thirty-five years from now. Anything can happen at any time, and just because the past five years have been by and large horrific that doesn't mean they always will be. I can imagine now how long it must have felt, for my parents and their peers, like the Vietnam War would never end. It did end, and with all the stumbling about we did find a path forward. The path our government has forged since September 11, 2001 is nothing to be proud of.
Every year on this date, we are exhorted by our government to look back. We would do it anyway; but they seem to feel that if they didn't encourage us, we might forget the things that they wanted us to learn from it. I hope that today, looking back, we might find the _real_ lessons, might find something we can use to go forward past the very, very, very dark place in which we have been trapped for so long. We do need to know how we got here. But what I want to know, and what no one can tell me, is how we are going to get out.
My thoughts are with everyone who has lost someone in the last five years, no matter where or to what. May those who have gone ahead help us all find a way to move forward.
Peace,
The Plaid Adder
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