LECURE ON 09/11 Spech 2002

Dr. Richard C. Kagan. Hamline University
09/11 spech 2002

Karen Smith, Ean Schneideer, Jeffrey Schrier.
These are the names in alphabetical order of the human beings who were murdered in the inferno of the twin towers attack. These names are being repeated today at ground zero.
When I hear them I think of all the times these 3000 plus people heard their names in roll call-in school, in the military, at their office, in some type of line. Or they heard their names called by their mother, father, child, or spouse. Then they declared "present." Now there is silence. I think of the future. Of your graduation from Hamline. Your name will be called and you will walk up, acknowledge receipt of your diploma, shake the hand of president ones, and return to your seat. In between each of you, in alphabetical order I think of the murdered legion that will not respond with "here" or "present." I am reminded f the phrase -"There but for the grace of god went I."
The terror of 9/11 is not only in the nature of the death and destruction of the lives in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, but in the name itself. 9/11 represents a time, not a place. It is not like remembering Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Jerusalem where terror and death have reigned. It cannot be isolated into a small community. It is signified by a date, by a whole day that embraces you wherever you live. It is a constant threat to your security, and a constant reminder that your name might be called without your ability to know why or to respond.
9/11-Its encompassing nature, its destruction of innocents, its annual return, its lack of geographical boundaries creates a need to deal with its memory every time we are conscious about our own mortality, and our goals in life. Each of us can remember where we were on that day. Each of us knows that that day might have been our last. I had just finished packing my luggage and as on my way out the door to the airport to give a lecture in congress in Washington D.C. when my wife yelled out to me: "stop! You are not leaving the house! You are not getting on an airplane. Come look at the TV. Look what happened at the Pentagon." I stayed. And I did not unpack for over a week! The shock was too great.
The way each of us remembers and individually memorializes 9/11 provides us with a strategy to deal with the consequences of the terror. If there were time I would discuss the many ways that holocaust survivors and their families created strategies for understanding and acting on their experiences. But for now, I want to choose three concrete strategies and analyze them in terms of American foreign policy.
1. The toxic memory. This strategy concentrates on the evilness of the perpetrators and wants to exact revenge. In terms of foreign policy, this type of memory mobilizes the society to hunt down the aggressors. In terms of monument building, this type of memory is concretized in statues of armed soldiers or heroes. It is exemplified by promoting a fashion of strength, macho resolve, and heroic language.
Intellectually, it survives in the waters of primordial analysis-these currents of thought deliver ideas that there are suppressed hatreds that are being unleashed, that these hatreds are mobilized by ethnic or religious groups, and that intervention is inevitable. These monuments to heroism, whether they are in bronze or names listed and photographs printed in the newspaper, can manipulate our feelings to seek for protection from the perpetrators. The search for security can become a truncheon to knock us into a state of fear. We erect color codes for security warnings, we take away constitutional freedoms of due process, and we produce expensive operations that invade our privacy but provide for little extra security. Fear becomes instilled invade daily lives. We begin to think that the body politik is our body-one in the same. That the attack on America is an attack on ourselves. And that we can secure America by holding onto every person-especially ethnic and religious individuals-in order to check them out.
2. The opposite of the toxic memory is the redemptive memory. Whereas the toxic memory is usually the response of the state, the redemptive memory is the response of the public. We see it today in the nation-wide activities to memorialize the 9/11 dead. This view argues that the meaning of this moment is to get us to think more about our life, our goals, our family, and to renew our commitment to a more spiritual existence. Reading the names of each victim, not hero, is to acknowledge the significance of each life, of each presence, of each contribution to our community. These people were not killed in action. They were not heroes fighting for their country. They were like you and me. Living their own lives, unaware of the coming of the end of their earthly time. They were victims. They were murdered. And the innocence of their life reminds us of our own innocence and instills in us the need to live our life to its spiritual fullest. Wealth, status, prestige means nothing against the strike of the assassin. Only our own commitment to each other and the aesthetic wonder that our lives bring to others is important. This type of memory builds monuments like the Vietnam memorial wall, or the civil rights memorial in Atlanta where names are engraved on a black stone and water spills over them. The viewer traces the name with his or her finger and feels the water cool the submerged hand. One comes in touch with the life force of the departed. Today's noon service is an excellent example of the redemptive memorial.
3. The third memory is what David Linenthal calls, civic memory this memory is a call for people to use the past to create better and safer community. Although it does not ignore the need for security or the need for redemptive spiritual enrichment, it focuses on the need to renew society on all its levels. This means that there should be attention to building a culture, a social organization, an economy, and an educational system that sustains equality, justice, openness, and a remarkable quality for human life, both at home and abroad. The monument should embrace both the perpetrators and the abused. An example of this is the world war two monuments on Okinawa. Over one third of the Okinawan population was killed by Japanese and American armies battling over the possession of this strategic outpost. The monument represents all the dead domestic and foreign, Japanese and Okinawa. It is neither toxic nor redemptive. It is calling for a realization what out of this killing, torture, and destruction; a new civilization must come into being. Security and spiritual fulfillment are necessary, but no sufficient for repairing and building a new world.
How does all of this relate to our political response to 9/11? From my view, we all make decisions based upon our assumptions of the nature of life, the nature of the world, and the nature of tragedy as e understand it. For me, president Bush represents the worst possible reaction to 9/11. By building a wall of national security, and by using America as launch pad to attack or threaten the rest of the world, he mirrors the enemy. While I respect and admire, and am sometimes even envious of the people who stress the redemptive view of 9/11, I agree with my German and French friends that we are over reacting and are just re-enforcing America's isolationistic view of the world. We seem to have no empathy for all the cities, villages, and communities we have reduced to rubble. At graduation we should intersperse the names of our graduates with people who have been murdered in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe if we wish to include all the victims, not just those who died on the soil of the United States.
A civic memory would lead us to try to remedy the immense social and economic inequalities, to work for environmental protections, to eschew or drop the notion that we are unique or possessed with a special divine endowment that exempts us from the judgments of others. We need to develop a broader view f this war against terror. One that enlists all people as equals rather than as them vs. US.
In the end, 9/11 for me is a challenge to create a better life for all. The date will re-occur every year, whether you or I are here or not. It is a date that is not just of or America, but for the world itself. We must not create a barricaded state or a country just for ourselves. These murders were created by a global organization. And a global response to build better civilizations will be the most effective response. Otherwise, we will all die in vain.

Karen Smith, Ean Schneideer, Jeffrey Schrier.
Goodbye.