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Sept. 12, 2001
"Tell your friends, tell your brothers and sisters to be rational toward
human beings who seem to be different. It's very necessary right now because
this is a time of high emotion," an Indiana University Bloomington student
admonished his peers Wednesday in a special forum at the Indiana Memorial Union.
The noon event in Alumni Hall lasted more than two hours and drew more than
150 students, faculty and staff on a day filled with remembrances and
discussions of Tuesday's terrorist attack on the United States. The message,
echoed by the panel of faculty experts in terrorism, international law, grief
and philosophy, was one that called for tolerance, understanding and
consolation.
The panel consisted of William Head, assistant professor of criminal justice;
Jost Delbruck, professor of international law; Jeffrey Isaac, Rudy Professor of
Political Science; Kathleen Gilbert, associate professor of applied health
science; and moderator Robert Eno, associate professor of East Asian Languages
and Cultures. They answered questions that ranged from a request to summarize
the major conflicts in the Middle East to how to handle the guilt of grief.
For the student who called for understanding, there was but one issue.
"There's a lesson to be learned," he said. "Horrible things are happening all
over the planet, and people are dying for unnecessary reasons."
Copies of a statement from the IU Bloomington Campus Muslim Student Union
circulated throughout the day via e-mail. The letter reminded readers that
Muslims have friends and family who worked in the Wolrd Trade Center and for the
federal government, too. "American Muslims share a profound sense of sorrow,"
the letter said.
"We have all been tested," the letter went on. "Regardless of who is
ultimately found to be responsible for these terrorist murders, no ethnic or
religious community should be treated as suspect and collectively blamed.
"It is our hope that we can avoid finger-pointing and rather work together as
a unified nation to see our way through this horrific event. Our prayers are
with the victims and their families," the letter concluded.
"All of us are affected and troubled by Tuesday's events," stated another
letter, this one from Kenneth A. Rogers, associate dean and director of the
Office of International Services.
"At the time I write this, no group has been found responsible for the
attacks. Please be sensitive to the fact that emotions are running high all
across the country and there may be people who will jump to conclusions or take
advantage of this stressful period to take out their frustrations or express
their prejudices against others," Rogers wrote.
Rogers encouraged students who feel singled out in any way because of their
nationality or ethnicity to discuss their concerns with an adviser in the Office
of International Services or any of the campus offices that deal with harassment
issues. If such incidents are threatening in any way, students are urged to
report them to the IU Police Department or Bloomington City police.
Reports of verbal confrontations were made to university administrators on
Wednesday. At least one student reported being physically assaulted by someone
who reportedly accused her of celebrating Tuesday's tragedy. The vast majority
of students on the IU Bloomington campus and on IU's other campuses were focused
on organizing ways to help and ways to heal.
"Yesterday, my feelings were hurt more than they've ever been hurt," one
student told forum panelists. "I feel bad for going to class," she said, wiping
away tears. "I feel bad for carrying on with my life. I swear I think about
those people all the time and their families. I just don't know how I'm supposed
to deal with this."
"By doing what you're doing right now," Gilbert said softly. "What you're
feeling is wonderful. You're a caring person who looks at those people and can
relate to the experiences they're having. The best way to deal with your
feelings is to do exactly what you're doing and that is talk about what you're
feeling.
"Another way is genuinely to let yourself cry. It has a therapeutic effect.
It has a physiological therapeutic effect for you to cry," Gilbert said.
"The other thing to do is to be active in any way that you can, to be
helpful," she said.
"Accept the person that you are," Gilbert admonished.
And reach out to your fellow human being.
When I learned of the awful events yesterday morning, I was shocked and speechless. I was beside myself with horror and grief. I did not know what to do. I did not feel as if I could do anything.
In my demoralization I decided to do what I often do. To sit down and write. Words dripped from my fingertips. I decided I must share this experience with my class. What I will say now is a slightly altered version of what I said yesterday.
The past twenty four hours have been simply awful. The life of this country has been murderously disrupted. I cannot pretend that this has not happened, or go on as if we can simply do business as usual. In this I am not alone. That is why we are all here.
As a native New Yorker, whose family lives in New York City, and who knows people who worked in the World Trade Center, and as a Jewish-American who has numerous reasons to fear whenever such incidents occur, I am as shaken as I have ever been in my 44 years.
These past hours have been for me very emotional. I have also had cause to reflect on my emotions, and to ask myself why I feel as I do, how I can reconcile my various feelings, what my feelings mean, and what I should do with my feelings.
There are no doubt other ways of responding to such horror. But I want to underscore how important I think it is to stop and think. To stop and think is not to push aside one's emotions. But it is to reflect intelligently on these emotions. One of the things that distinguishes human beings from other species is our ability to do this. I do believe that now is no time to abandon our humanism.
This is what I told my class yesterday: "Today's events are horrible and difficult to process. But because I am a teacher, because the brutal and awful events of today are surely a 'teachable moment,' because it is my job, and my vocation, to treat such moments as opportunities to teach, and also because -- and I hope this does not sound condescending -- you are young people, away from your homes and families, who might perhaps wish to process these events together with others and to take some comfort from this sharing, I have decided that one of the things I should do with my feelings is to TEACH.
"So here we are. I will not cancel class today."
We then talked for some time. Students wanted this. We had a free-flowing discussion. Then we reflected on the various reasons why these horrific events matter so deeply to us. We talked about the role of fear and vulnerability. We talked about patriotism and what love of country means. We talked about the meaning of elemental human sympathy and revulsion at the needless suffering and death of others.
We sought, in short, to articulate our feelings and our fears, and to use them to achieve a greater understanding. We sought this understanding NOT in the name of mere academic achievement, but in the name of human coping. We humans cope better when we understand what we are coping with.
Many of you have feelings and thoughts that you want to share. I hope and trust that today's forum will be one of many opportunities for you to do this, to talk and to listen. I would like briefly to share with you some of my own thoughts, offered not in the spirit of a preacher or counselor but rather in the spirit of a professor and a fellow human being and citizen hoping to stimulate some serious thought among his students and fellow human beings and citizens.
We Americans have long lived in a dream world. We have imagined ourselves to be beyond history, to be inhabitants of a New World removed from the horrors of the Old. We are the beneficiaries of geography and history. We have not experienced world war or holocaust on our soil. Even Pearl Harbor was a remote place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean far from the mainland of our country.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was nonetheless a profound and traumatic experience for our nation precisely because of its unprecedented character.
Yesterday's attacks are in some ways, I think, a Pearl Harbor for our own generation. Not in the sense that they will precipitate war or world war -- though right now there is too much we simply do not know about who is behind these attacks, why, and what the official responses will be -- but in the sense that they represent a powerful loss of innocence.
What will it mean for us to lose our distinctive American innocence? Will it be an occasion for us simply to shake our big stick at the rest of the world? Or will it provoke some genuinely new thinking about how to achieve justice as well as how to fight terrorism?
Beyond the specifics of our history, I think that these events signify a deep vulnerability that is central to our complex, post-industrial, globalized world. We are incredibly reliant on others, all across the globe. Our daily lives are premised upon extraordinarily dense and fragile interrelationships. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear to our manner of communication by phone and Internet to our manner of transportation by car or plane to our manner of subsistence through the use of money, we rely on things beyond our immediate control. Our social world is built upon trust.
Today's terrorist attacks highlight the fragility of that trust, and also our vulnerability when evil people seek to exploit that trust by treating passenger planes or crowded buildings as opportunities to commit mass murder. We cannot help but be disoriented and frightened by all of this. As Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, we are all connected in a single "garment of destiny." Today's events are a chilling reminder of this, and also a reminder of how vulnerable even we, citizens of the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth, are.
What will we do with this knowledge? How will we seek to address our common vulnerability? Will we strike out at others? Or will we truly take responsibility for our common world, as citizens of the United States and as citizens of the world, as cosmopolitans who are pained by suffering and indignant at terrorism everywhere, whether this terrorism be the work of rogue terrorists or rogue states or state terrorists who happen to be supposed allies of our own government?
Yesterday one of my students spoke profoundly of her horror at the thought that a very small number of people can so easily do harm to so many. We are, she noted, caught up in this complex world together. This is frightening. It confers upon some of us the power to do great harm. But it also confers upon us the power to do great good. The efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his colleagues are simply one example of this. How will we think about this power? How will we use this power?
There is, finally, a deeper and more perplexing problem that confronts us today. This is the problem of evil. This problem has plagued philosophers for millennia. Today it plagues each and every one of us. What causes men and women to commit such evil acts? How can we fathom such deliberate killing of so many people? How do we understand the motivations of the killers, who cannot possibly have any clear utilitarian goal? These killings cannot possibly generate any sympathy for any cause and cannot possibly produce any favorable political good for anyone. They provoke nothing but fear and horror. They perhaps can best be seen as evil acts, hateful acts, acts motivated by sheer hate, by a bitterness or resentment or desire simply to kill many other people to fulfill some base emotional purpose. What can such a purpose be?
Could it be a religious purpose? And, if so, what can this mean? How can a love of God inspire such hatred? And how can we fathom such evil whatever its motivation?
The horror of the past twenty-four hours presents many questions for us to ponder. Let us hope that we take the full measure of these questions.
As we do, I would like to leave you with two thoughts.
First, the philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote that sheer violence is the antithesis of politics. If politics is about the way humans together build and inhabit a common world and manage their interactions in such a common world, sheer violence is random, purposeless, and destructive. It violates any sense of commonality, any sense of responsibility, and any sense of humanity.
Yesterday's evil is not strictly political, and our first responses to it are properly not political. But I think we must use the occasion of this evil to ask ourselves how we may restore our common world, how we may take responsibility for this world, how we may better live together in the world. This is not a partisan problem but it is very much a political problem, a problem of civic responsibility. In order to address it, we must talk together and act together. And we must learn to live together. I am not a pacifist. Part of what we must learn is how to better use force to truly protect the lives and freedoms of ourselves and of others. But this learning is no easy task. And it involves much more than simple striking out with violence.
Second, moments of vulnerability, fear, and trembling are also moments of moral danger. It is natural and appropriate for us to seek the solace of our fellow citizens. It is natural, and also appropriate, for us to seek security against such attacks, to support the efforts of our police and our armed forces to provide such security, and also to desire that justice be enforced on those who planned and performed these terrible terrorist attacks.
But as we rightly pursue justice, we also must be careful. Writing amidst the Algerian civil war in which his very own family stood in the crossfire, the French writer Albert Camus said that the role of the intellectual is "to clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms."
Now is not a time for fuzzy thinking or mental intoxication or fanaticism.
There is much that we simply do not know that we must know before we can begin intelligently to assess responsibility and seek punishment for these crimes.
But we do know this: we must never scapegoat entire peoples, and we must never rush to judgment. Here I cannot help but to moralize: in the name of the very civility that has been so brutally disrupted by these evil terrorists, we must remain adamantly respectful of the rule of law and of the social, racial, ethnic, and political pluralism that is at the heart of what is best in our country.
I do not know who organized these attacks. But I know that whoever did so is NOT the representative of any ethnic or national group or people, whatever they might claim and however some contemptible individuals might hail these awful acts.
These events should not be an occasion to vilify any ethnic, religious, or national group of people. They ARE an occasion to hold responsible those specific individuals or groups who planned and committed the attacks. But there is no such thing as collective guilt. Every ethnic, religious, or national group is made up of diverse individuals with diverse experiences and opinions. It is theoretically and morally wrong to view such groups as singular and to hold all members of such groups responsible for the actions of some members of a group.
The quest for collective revenge is a sign of barbarity. If our society goes down that road, it will be handing our terroristic enemies a victory that they have not earned.
This is partly because it is wrong to vilify others as members of ethnic, racial, or national groups. But it is also because it is wrong for us as individuals to merge ourselves into an angry or hysterical collective. Each and every one of us is a human individual, who is capable of feeling and thinking for themselves and who should feel and think for themselves.
Someone said yesterday that this is a time for us to come together. It IS a time for us to come together. But it is NOT a time for us to come together as a herd of cattle or sheep or a pack of ravenous wolves. It is time for us to come together as human beings and as citizens of a democratic republic. This means we must come together with sensitivity and intelligence, with a respect for the law and a respect for human rights. Justice pursued by these means is a justice worth having. Justice pursued by any other means is not true justice. It is tyranny.
I want to close. I have tried to speak in a reasoned way. This Monday I taught my class about Immanuel Kant's famous essay, "What Is Enlightenment." I have tried to suggest that now, more than ever, we need our wits and our intelligence about us.
Let me be more direct. Our nation is in crisis. In the days and weeks to come our country will confront some hard questions. As we do so, we must beware of jingoism. And we must not allow our appropriate anger at terrorism or desire to see the terrorists punished to pervert our sense of justice. We must not target so-called "foreign students." We must not blame Arabs or others who look or sound or dress like they come from the Middle East. As we face the days ahead, we will be tested as citizens and as moral beings. I hope that we are up to the test. I hope that we will think and act not as members of a herd but as citizens of a free and democratic society.
For someone who has felt speechless I have said quite a bit.
Think about it. And be well.
Jeffrey C. Isaac, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington