I guess the former political writer and patriot can’t quite shut up. So I had to write this.
I didn’t suffer from the 911 attacks nearly as much as thousands of other people did, from families to firefighters and police officers, many of whom are still sick and dying from the poisonous debris.
But I’ll never forget that day.
My own memory was common. I was living in a New Jersey Suburb at the time, and what I remember – everyone was in shock – was that children and their mothers were all out and standing at the bus stops where their father or mother would arrive after working in New York City.
Most of their fathers, I recall, did not come home that day, and what was burned into my memory was the faces of the sobbing children and mothers when it became apparent they would not ever be coming home again.
Some of the kids came back to the bus stops and railroad depots every day for weeks.
It felt like our country and much of the world had changed, becoming suspicious, anxious, and angry, never quite letting go. Nothing like that had ever happened in our homeland; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was far away; this struck at the heart of our biggest and greatest city.
Hatred and bitterness seemed like another tragedy of the attack, and over those 25 years I have seen that venom deepen.
That was a tragedy in so many ways, because after the destruction of the towers, Americans were as united as I had ever seen them; politics didn’t matter, nor did the many controversies of a democracy.
Listening to the increasingly vicious attacks associated with the coming election is heart-wrenching as well as frightening. Yet I do see a light at the end of the rainbow.
I see young politicians who are crossing those awful walls and talking to one another. They are not fighting for blood; they are fighting for change. They want something better. They want to be heard, not manipulated.
But hatred and division aren’t working with young people anymore. Truth and compassion – and true religion – are important again, and the red and the blue young are meeting one another online and increasingly talking to each other.
This new movement transcends political parties and labels. They want to live a good, safe, and comfortable..
They are realizing what young people through the ages have realized: together people are unstoppable; separated, they are lunch for the wealthy. It’s the oldest story in the world.
Politicians who aren’t listening or who are trapped in hellholes called politics will be sorry, sooner rather than later. These kinds of revolutions are unstoppable. Just go online and read about Kings and dictators.
I see people of all ages renewing older, very American ideas of compassion, working together, and tolerating differences. I’ve wondered these past few years whether it was coming or even real, but the very deep suffering of working families has made people on both sides of the divide see that we have all been trained in recent years to hate one another, refusing to tolerate other beliefs.
The terrorists at 911 did awful damage to our country, to our democracy. But the current evil- that have turned millions of Americans to hate other Americans is one of the things our Constitution was most concerned about.
These are the evil ones; I see it in the hateful advertising, the immorality and hatred of democracy that appears in one billion-dollar donation after another. They don’t listen to people; they dismiss them with labels like “woke.” That’s not working anymore either in case you can’t bear to pay attention.
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I’m not comparing the two, but I’m thinking of how 911 destroyed one kind of American community – when it mattered, we all came together – into another cultural and political devastation.
Poor and hard-working Americans are condemned to suffer from having to watch billionaire after billionnaire make more money in a week than they can ever spend or need, and buy zillion-dollar yachts.
In contrast, thhe young have no health care and can’t afford their food. This is just how the French Revolution began, a just cause that turned vicious.
Change is always met with ferocious resistance freedom is never free.
For the first time in my recent experience, the haters are being the hated, not just the rest of us.
It is in the nature of the powerful to split the workers – the “people”- in half, from ancient times to today.
If the Red and Blue people really started talking to one another and listening to one another, our world could change dramatically and in a positive, not cruel or violent way.
Throughout human history, simple, ordinary people have overthrown kings and cruel leaders.
That is what I see beginning to happen now. It just takes some triggers to set it off. It’s happening. I can feel it. History is full of this story. It is not like human beings to long accepted being cruelly exploited and cruelly treated.
The great philosopher and refugee Hannah Arendt said of revolution that “I liked the way the Americans did it rather than the French, who went around chopping people’s heads off.” We don’t do it that way.
Kings never seem to get the message; they all – every one – come to feel untouchable and get unspeakably greedy and arrogant.
It’s happened a thousand times in human history. Anger and frustration grow and boil; the system, forgetting ordinary people, comes apart.
The Kings were always able to gain power, but they never figured out how to govern and keep it and get away with corruption and murder.
I have faith that we are changing, and that the young, who haven’t been paying much attention, are in it now, sparking their own kind of modern revolution – truth, not violence; compassion, not hatred; sympathy, not insult and ridicule.
I’m excited. Stay tuned. Keep hope alive.
