9/11 Anniversary Reminds Us of America as One - Honor it with an Honest, Free Press

Seven years ago in the west coast pre-dawn hours I watched from my office in California's state capitol the confused early newscasts and then the second plane hit the twin towers. My colleague and I, who had been working long hours as our legislative session winded down, were living off a few hours sleep, and had come in to the office by 6 a.m. We were and are both Manhattanophiles and we were and both are lifelong believers in America and in our Democracy who will probably be dragged from public service in our dotage. During the course of the day our capitol building was evacuated, and we had to move across the street to the bar at the Hyatt Hotel to watch the news, but then went back when we thought the all-clear had been given and remained in our little, windowless space on the top floor, continuing to work on analysis of energy legislation for a hearing that would probably not be held the next morning as we sat riveted to the television screen.

We lost nothing of who we were as people or as Americans that day, but our hearts broke as the unthinkable happened and the towers came down. Neither of us thought about the steel, about the symbolism, but about the people inside. They were just like us. They had gone off to work on a sunny morning or had boarded a plane home or to some destination and did not deserve to have their lives wiped out over someone else's political views, someone else's hatred. It was a huge lesson in real time of the arbitrary nature of fate and the distorting power of hatred, propaganda, lies.

People who know a bit about the history of oil in the middle east, or people who have simply read a book or two, such as The Looming Tower, know that the path of propaganda that began to blame the west for all that is greedy, salacious and unholy in Arab countries, may have begun with Sayyidd Qutb, a religious conservative and generally unhappy and disgruntled Egyptian genteman who studied extensively in the United States in the 1940s and early 50s. While in this country, from our east coast to Colorado, rather than attempt to understand the culture of the land in which he studied, Qutb, whose religious views were extremely fundamentalist and isolationist even in his native Egypt, judged his observation of American behavior and norms in that era against his own strident beliefs. He left the country sure in his mind that this was a decadent place and that Egypt and the Muslim world were best off without western influences. His view was not a popular one, as oil and oil money had brought much westernization to the Middle East, and the middle of the 20th century was a time of great cultural change due to development in Egypt and elsewhere in general. Traditional life was changing as it had or was changing all over the world. Qutb formed the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical, fundamentalist group not well-received by the military run government of Egypt. Qutb was arrested on numerous occasions and was subjected to torture. He was ultimately executed because he refused the terms of pardon offered to him and chose to be a martyr to his cause, and the Muslim Brotherhood eventually morphed over time into what is now Al Qaeda. There is a direct, historical link between the two sets of World Trade Center attackers, from the 1990s and from 2001, back to the anti-government, anti-military and anti-western fundamentalist views and groups of Sayyid Qutb. What began as a quest to retain strict religious laws in societies that were becoming somewhat secular and where many religions existed, became distorted as Qutb's worldview distorted, and as he responded to the physical mistreatment he received as a result of his crimes. The story of Osama Bin Laden is not much different from Qutb's, but on Septmber 11, 2001, it was the full force of Bin Laden's blind hatred that I felt and that would cost thousands of Americans and others their lives that day.

I don't think it's simply because I was in a building that represented government that day, a building that had to be evacuated and that now has all sorts of barriers around it and metal detectors that I pass through many times a day, that I think about 9/11 often, not just on its anniversary. Ironically, our state capitol had been attacked just a few months before 9/11, an angry trucker had plowed into the building, causing an explosion and fire that did significant damage to the building and that made it shake with the force of a violent earthquake at the time. I knew there was this outside chance of random violence just as readily as hundreds in Oklahoma City have known of it ever since April 19, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and his co-horts parked an explosive filled truck next to the Federal building there, and people in San Francisco have known of it since November 27, 1978, when Dan White entered City Hall and shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk dead. People have issues. They have grievances. They dislike government. They may hold extreme religious views. Sometimes, over a period of time, they organize, they spread propaganda, they indoctrinate others to their worldview. Always, without exception in order to do this, they rely upon distortion of facts, spreading of misinformation, forming of incidents, ideas, scripture, history, etc, around their own worldviews or agendas.
Most likely due to the quality of our life in America, the quality of law enforcement here, and the reality that we have a free and widespread press, there haven't been huge factions of Americans who've been able to gather together to spread hatred, misinformation, etc. to such a degree that they could attack anyone in this country or elsewhere on the scale of the 9/11 attacks. Yes, we have domestic terrorists. We've seen wholesale loss of life of innocent people, especially in Oklahoma City, because of someone's petty grievance that grew so large that person and the small group he organized thought it was okay to take the lives of hundreds of innocent people to send a message. And the truth is, while virtually every American of sound mind abhors the actions of those domestic terrorists, there are many people in this country who actually share their extreme, xenophobic and anti-government views - their fears that their way of life is being taken away from them by people whose lifestyles are different than their or by people of color, people from other countries, or by the government they see as not doing their bidding. Many of these folks want to be left alone to live as they see fit and they don't want to contribute to a country that supports such a plurality.

If you take away the religious foundation, there is little difference between the motivation of Timothy McVeigh in 1995 and the motivations of Sayyid Qutb in the many bombing and raids he had planned through the Muslim Brotherhood. The arrogance of assuming one way of life, one way of thinking is supreme to all others and that their lives and their views were more important than the lives of people who thought differently from them or who just happened to be in a certain place at a certain time is probably the apex of evil.

Our government and its leaders (incuding both current presidential candidates) all condemned both the domestic actions in Oklahoma City and the actions of the 9/11 terrorists. And, obviously, there was a greater perceived threat, not to our way of life, but to our very lives, from the 9/11 attacks. They were launched from elsewhere. People had been here, had come and gone many times, and came back for the single purpose of taking thousands of lives to send a message. The force of the event knocked more than the wind out of all Americans seven years ago, it hit at our sense of daily safety. We had to face that safety is really an illusion. And we didn't like that. I suppose we thought we were somehow different from Lebanon, for example, where bombings are much more frequent and the devastation to civilian lives over time is much greater than it has been here. We didn't see America as the heart of such strife and conflict, and indeed it wasn't and still isn't, and some of that stability arises from our stable goverment and the attributes of our working democracy.

But, we have our own brand of propaganda and it is stinging right now as we review a dark day in our history. We had a very free press on September 11, 2001. There was full coverage of all aspects of the attacks as there had been of all major events in this country. Only months earlier there was much rancor about the 200o election and it took an unprecedented two months to declare a final victor. We took hard looks at ourselves, our institutions, and it was only a couple of years earlier we'd questioned the judgment of our own president for lying to us about his personal misconduct. We weren't afraid of facing issues, and while the internet and our changing media were sometimes throwing fantastic theories at us due to how quickly some 'news' went to press, over time we tended to distill fact from fiction. We were a little divided at the time, but we came together in tragedy and we came together with the intent of remaining together.

Something terrible has happened in this country since September 11, 2001. We have refused to maintain a free and open press. And by we I don't mean our government, I mean us, the citizens. We listen to talk radio of our particular political bent. We let ministers and politicians blend messages. We scan past the newsreaders and on to the talking heads. We all know them. O'Reilly, Olbermann, Beck, etc. We let them direct us to blogs, to websites. We are told you can't trust the New York Times or the New York Post, one is too left, the other too right. Actually, people hardly read the news pages of the papers any more and head right for the editorials, if htey read at all. Mostly, they see things reprinted and they repeat them.

When someone says a newspaper is left-leaning or right-leaning, there is only so much fact in that. Yes, they can choose which stories to report up and where to place those stories. They can pick up 3/4 of a wire story. But, when it comes to factual reporting, all newspapers are subject to libel laws. They can reprint something one politician said about another, but they cannot say the assertion is true if it is not. They can editorialize all they want with impunity because we have freedom of speech here, but facts have to remain facts. So, ultimately the New York Times and the New York Post each have to print some facts. They should also maintain a modicum of civility even in their editorializing, even when they are expressing outrage. Frankly, America has always been a pretty civil country. But you probably couldn't tell that by reading from most internet sites today. Civility has gone the way of factual reporting. We won't get either back unless we demand that they come back. On days like today, days when we remember that for no real reason, due to nothing happening at the moment, thousands of people got up seven years ago and by the time sun set they had breathed their last breath. Yes, two towers went down, the Pentagon was damaged, but those are buildings. Are we about institutions, structures in this country or are we about the collective fiber of our character?

We aren't any different than Sayyid Qutb is we want to take our worldview to places and impose it upon them - to judge actions in one place based upon the standard of our family or our faith, etc. Qutb spoke with fervor due to the vehemence of his beliefs. He distorted his own faith and the faith of others, and really, nothing he did was for the preservation of a way of life or a way of believing, it was about assuming power and imposing will. He wanted his way to be bigger and stronger than someone else's way. It is a classic example of lacking the ability to live humbly, to really possess faith.

We fight a simlar battle here. We are much more divided than we were on the morning of September 11, 2001 before everything happened, even though at the time there was much division present here. We came together, briefly, over shared loss - but then we took that loss and used it for our own purposes in some cases. For some it was a failure of leadership, for others it wasa signal that the gloves had to come off or our way of life would go away. But, I think for most of us it was neither ot these things. The events of 9/11 were singular, and in their aftermath it was too late to prevent them, though certainly a good time to start looking at our vulnerabilities. Of course obsessing over our vulnerabilities is the sort of thing that leads to mistrust, hatred, division.

We have to stop obsessing. Words are powerful. Images are powerful. But, reason must prevail. I don't think those towers stood for the strength of our democracy. The strength of our democracy was the people inside. Moreso even than the heroic people on Flight 93 who were doomed but who wanted their final actions to be something that prevented more loss of life, the lessons of 9/11 are in the firefighters who headed into buildings in situations like no other in their lives, the people who helped each other down stairwells and then went back in to help other colleagues, the ones who hugged in their last moments, made phone calls, reached out in love. They did not know exactly what had happened, and they did not know why, but they knew they were not alone and thier instincts were to help, to come together.

Those are not our collective instincts right now. Look at news stories. They are petty. They talk about who meant what by this or that comment. They exaggerate someone's accomplishments or downplay someone else's. They do not allow us to look at people as people - but force us to look at them as symbols, either of something we must love and value and support, or of something we must hate and fear and crush. Read articles on Associated Content or anywhere else on the interner pertaining to politics in the US or to political figures and count the important facts you read. Look at campaign commercials and count up the specific items of policy that the ad contains - this is what we will do, or have done - versus the number of attacks that appear. Often, long after misinformation has been debunked, it keeps getting reprinted. We are told this person will bring more harm because he represents more of the same, or thise person will bring harm because he represents change from our current direction. We focus on the part that says HARM, and we take away nothing from what the exact direction is. The plain, hard truth is, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama wants to harm any American or his or her way of life. Both of them love this country, both of them have served this country most of their adult lives. Each of them has a record of service, in government, the community, military service and/or beyond that. As I write this today the overwhelming majority of Americans know who they want to vote for in November so all the babble won't change their minds. At the same time, many Americans don't really know why they are voting for either person. All of the misinformation in the press, all of the blogging and posturing and stretching the truth and relying on words of hatred as opposed to cold assessment of fact, will only hurt our country and our eventual leader.

In honor of 9/11 and until the election I think each American should contribute to and demand a free press, a fact-based press, a press that does not utter words of hatred and does not intentionally mislead. Each American should do a little research if they really care about who they vote for (and for those who want to just vote according to their party and don't need to know more, that's fine too - do that) and assess that person's record and assertions. It's a big lie to say we know nothing about two people who have been in office (Obama and Palin) relatively short periods of time. They have records, they have taken actions - and it's time to compare those actions to their words today and to question them further. If something they say doesn't ring true with what they have done in the past - we should be asking them that. That's what our debates should be about - issues. No ridiculous, moral dialogues with preachers. That tells us nothing about the direction of our country in these men's hands because no one asked what would you do in this specific situation.

And, because it has to be said out loud at this time, as a country and within our press, it is time to stop looking at and writing about and assessing John McCain and Barack Obama based on race. That is what has been happening, just as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were judged (and are) in the press based on gender. When you insert race and gender into the issue you are subliminally raising fear and hatred. John McCain is not 'Old, White Guy" - he is John McCain. Barack Obama is not "Young Black Guy", he is Barack Obama. At 47 and 72, they are both mature adults, both old enough to be president and both experienced enough to be president if we go by who our past presidents were. We've had some older presidents, and with lifespans getting longer, age alone is not sufficient reason to discount a leader. We've had presidents who'd only been in the Senate or were first term Governors.

So, our press and those who respond to it need to take age and race off the table. No more Muslim rumors. No more references to melanoma and heart disease. No more pictures of the one visit to the ancestral home in Kenya and limiting pictures with the midwestern grandparents who raised Obama. No more subliminal messages that just because someone's white and Republican that he is more of the same.

Who are these candidates? The information is out there. If we'll turn down the volume of hatred, racism, ageism, etc., we can hear what is being said. And, we can ask the important questions. Each of us needs to look at ourselves, at the state of this democracy, at the condition of our press and what we choose to read or not read and believe or not believe, and we need to rise to this important occasion. We are the lucky ones. We didn't perish randomly, we didn't lose our lives on the battlefield or as collateral damage. We are here, alive, free. Do we push past people who don't look like us, or who are disabled or who don't go to our church in our rush to get down those stairs to fresh air and the potential for survival - or do we do what so many did on 9/11, walk together, help each other and live or die having done the right thing?