September 20, 2001
The Lesson
By Eve Brown-Waite
Like everyone else in America, I have been glued to the television since Tuesday. The scenes are horrific, unbelievable and somehow... familiar. I see the rubble-covered streets and asked myself, where have I seen this before? And a commentator answers by saying "My, God! It looks like downtown Beirut..." or Belfast or Sarajevo, I think.
And I watch the anguished men and women cradling pictures of their lost loved ones, pleading desperately "Have you seen him? Have you seen her?"
"Have you ever seen anything like this?" asked the reporter. Yes, I think, I have. In Chile, Nicaragua, Uganda and Sudan where thousands of people disappeared without a trace. It's just the first time that we are the ones dancing with the missing.
All week long, I've heard over and over the heart-breaking stories of ordinary people - secretaries and firefighters, stock analysts and flight attendants, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons
—
who went to work never to come home again. Where, I asked myself, have I heard this before? Oh, yeah, in South Africa, Palestine, Israel, Kenya...
This unbearable pain, this devastation is not a new experience - it is only new to us. We Americans are
experiencing —
for the first time
—
what has been far too common for people the world over. And too often that pain and devastation has been inflicted with the backing and support of our government.
And now Americans speak of justice and the revenge that is rightfully ours. But there can be no justice. Justice means making things right. And what happened in New York and Washington on Tuesday can never be made right. Kill Osama Bin Laden ten thousand times over and we still won't have justice. Burn Afghanistan to ashes and we might have our revenge. But we would also be guilty of inflicting the same suffering onto thousands more innocent people and ensuring that the cycle of suffering continues.
But what if we could somehow learn from this tragedy? If you believe, as I do, that there is a lesson to be learned from everything in this life, then surely there must a tremendous lesson to be gleaned from this most tremendous grief. I think there is. And it's a lesson so important that it could change us as a nation and change the course of the future.
I think the lesson is that the absolutely unbearable pain and grief that we feel now is the same pain and grief that is felt by people everywhere when they are bombed and slaughtered, have their peace shattered and their cities destroyed. It doesn't matter by whom or for what end. The pain that we feel now is the same pain that so many others have felt for so long. If we can truly grasp that bit of wisdom, then we will see to it that we are no longer
—
wittingly or unwittingly
—
the cause of that suffering. If we can learn that great lesson then maybe this whole meaningless horror might have some meaning. And then we will arise from the flames and the dust and the rubble as a more compassionate and wise people. And as a truly great nation. Then, perhaps, all those innocent people who died on Tuesday will not have died for nothing.
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