Breaking the Cycles of Vengeance

I've been pulling together an article for a forthcoming book on the terrible
events of two weeks ago. I  thought it would be useful to folks involved in
service learning. A number of teachers have said this will give useful
perspective for their students.  Having been on the road speaking since
these events hit, I sense a newfound openness to larger questions of purpose
and common good. I don't think I've ever had students listen so intently or
respond so passionately.

To me, we face a complicated challenge, with several interconnected tasks.
We need to help our students explore the deepest roots of these wrenching
events, and help them voice their opinions on them as citizens in a
democracy. We need to make sure that this crisis doesn't totally deflect us
from  working to heal all the other wounds of our communities. And we need
to keep on nurturing the students we teach  and encouraging their
participation, even if they disagree with each other (or us) on this and
other critical issues related to our common future. I think this crisis will
demand a lot of us, now and in months to come, but it can also be a real
learning opportunity.
Paul Loeb



Forthcoming in: America's Tragedy: A Spiritual Response (Rodale Press, Oct
2001-an anthology of responses to the Sept 11 attacks, with profits going to
the Red Cross). Pass on to anyone interested.


BREAKING THE CYCLE OF VENGEANCE

By Paul Rogat Loeb

It's hard to look deep into our souls. It's harder still when we feel
profoundly violated, when the boundaries of our world have instantly
crumbled. But we need to look deep if we want more than revenge for the
crimes that killed over 6,000 innocent people. As citizens, we must help
prevent these kinds of horrors from continuing, generation after generation,
in the United States or any other place on this earth.

Our president has called this "a war between good and evil." He vows to "rid
the world of evildoers." Overwhelmed with outrage and loss and wanting to
feel united, most Americans cheer him on. The attacks were evil,
unequivocally so. Nothing could ever justify them. Yet U.S. policies may
have sowed some of the seeds for this terrible day. And we can't afford to
fuel the cycles of indiscriminate violence. To help prevent still more
innocent deaths, we need to use the lessons of what happened to chart a
different path. The future depends not only on our government's actions, but
also on our own, as individual citizens.

For all our anger and sorrow, and for all the monstrous and inexcusable
deeds of the hijackers, we still need to ask what made them so bitterly
despairing that they were willing to murder thousands in the name of their
cause. Even as we work to bring them to justice, it's not naïve to ask what
made them act as they did. It's essential for breaking the endless cycles of
vengeance.

A few months back, I read a newspaper article about a Palestinian terrorist.
He crossed the Israeli border and blew himself up along with a group of
Israelis. Originally an apolitical man, he worked as a jailor, assigned to
guard a top official from one of the militant West Bank groups. The two
became friends, but the jailor remained uninterested in politics. Then an
Israeli bomb blew up his friend. The jailor lost hope, abandoning everything
but retribution. He took his own life-and as many innocent Israeli lives as
he could. They could have been my cousins in Tel Aviv.

Just as something turned this man, something turned the hijackers. Maybe it
was watching corrupt dictatorships like Saudi Arabia inviting U.S. bases
onto their soil. Maybe it was seeing Palestinians shot and bombed by Israeli
soldiers with American backing. Maybe it was the Gulf War and the one
million Iraqis who have died because the war and our continuing embargo have
destroyed their most basic health and sanitation systems. Or our bombing of
Sudan's only pharmaceutical factory, on what turned out to be false charges
that it was producing biological weapons and was tied to Osama bin Laden.

There's more troubling history. Our leaders, including Bush senior, helped
create the Mujahideen to drive the Russians from Afghanistan and worked with
Osama bin Laden in the process. They backed Saddam Hussein and his Baathist
Party as a counterweight to Iran, whose Ayatollah came to power as leader of
the only force capable of overthrowing the brutal Shah. The United States
had supported the Shah since our CIA installed him in 1953, after
overthrowing an elected prime minister who'd dared to talk of nationalizing
oil. Coincidentally, September 11 was the anniversary of the CIA-backed coup
overthrowing Chile's elected Allende government, launching nearly twenty
years of Pinochet's brutal dictatorship.

The ordinary Americans whose inexcusable deaths rend our hearts may have
died in part because of our own government's past actions. As always, the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the innocents.  Unless we create a more
just world, desperate men from voiceless communities will continue to
destroy more innocent lives, here and abroad.

How then, as citizens, do we respond? In a crisis of this magnitude, people
understandably want to unite. I see flags and red, white, and blue ribbons
on houses and cars, purses, and bodies. The flags are a way for people to
say their spirits won't be cowed, and to do something tangible, along with
donating blood, supplies, and money. But they can also promote a
self-righteous crusade of good versus evil.

I saw this on a beach near my Seattle neighborhood, where people had
surrounded our local 10-foot-tall version of the Statue of Liberty with an
impromptu shrine commemorating the dead. They'd left candles and flowers,
crosses and American flags, peace signs, a New York City firefighter's
shirt, and messages of mourning. But then a fundamentalist megachurch
descended to hold a rally, overwhelming the original circle of diverse
messages with new ones proclaiming "An eye for an eye," and "Kill a
terrorist for Jesus!"

If we feel like wearing or flying the flag, we should. But maybe we need to
display it next to banners or buttons asking for true justice, not
vengeance. And ribbons of mourning that recognize our common humanity-even
with the men who lost theirs by being so tangled with rage that they didn't
care who they killed.

It's tempting to say that in a time like this, we need to trust our national
leaders. They're probably right that some force will be needed to apprehend
the perpetrators of these inconceivable crimes. But our responses need to
focus on individuals, not populations. And proceed in a way that gives them
the broadest possible legitimacy, including in the communities from which
the bombers were recruited. Think of Iran, and the delicate path toward
democratization pursued by reformer Mohammad Khatami. Bomb enough Islamic
civilians, and his already-beleaguered regime will surely fall, replaced by
the Ayatollahs. Think of Pakistan, with its nuclear capabilities. If we
don't proceed with caution, acknowledging past misdeeds, we'll only incite
more terrorists. No one could argue with the trial of the bombers who
destroyed the Pan Am jet, near Lockerbie, Scotland. They blew up innocent
people. They were tried with full due process. Their jailing created no more
martyrs or cycles of hatred.

This crisis would daunt any national leader. Yet the president who now
commands our responses has spent his life sheltered by wealth, indulged by
friends in high places, and scripted in his every public appearance. With
few exceptions, his appointees have done everything possible to sunder
common responsibilities and common ties: a Vice President who repeatedly
voted against Head Start, school lunches for low-income children, and even
the mildest sanctions on South Africa; an Attorney General who's repeatedly
attacked African-American voting rights; a Secretary of the Interior who's
scorned our need to protect the earth; and a Secretary of Defense obsessed
with missiles that do not defend. Already, Bush has turned his back on our
interconnected world by rejecting, or proposing backing out of, so many
international treaties: on banning chemical, biological, and toxic weapons;
prosecuting war crimes; banning land mines; limiting the international small
arms trade (where weapons we sell as the world's largest arms dealer have
already been turned against us); and beginning to address global warming.
His missile defense system would shatter 25 years of arms control treaties.

I cite this history not to encourage self-righteousness among those of us
who question our government's response (God knows we all need humility now),
but to describe the real context in which we act. For it's going to be up to
ordinary citizens to raise the hard issues, including which crises we
consider urgent.

Congress just authorized $40 billion to rebuild New York and beef up
anti-terrorist security. Much of this investment is appropriate. But why
have we chosen not to make other investments addressing crises equally real?
According to Bread for the World, six million children die every year of
hunger-related causes in developing countries-the equivalent of three World
Trade Center attacks every day. For an annual appropriation of $13
billion-that's a third of what our Congress just authorized, or five percent
of our existing $260 billion dollar defense budget-we could meet the basic
health and nutrition needs of the world's poorest people every year. Yet
we've chosen not to. Nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance, but
we've chosen to be the only advanced industrialized country not to provide
it to our citizens. Guns kill 30,000 of us a year, yet we choose to do
little to control them or address the poverty and rage among our own
desperate and marginalized. I cite these examples not to diminish the horror
of these unjustifiable attacks, but to stress that all shattered lives are
just as real, and to ask why some cataclysms disturb us so little.

I fear that this tragedy will pave the way for needless and provocative
military buildups and interventions that will spawn further spirals of
vengeance. Already, the Bush administration is using the crisis as an excuse
to despoil the environment, to starve our every human need except physical
security, and to erode the very liberties that let us challenge destructive
actions of state.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine if these terrible events
inspired us all to take on the difficult work of creating a more just world,
and making the necessary common investments so indiscriminate violence and
needless suffering do not prevail.

The crisis has already produced a wealth of individual acts of courage and
compassion. We saw tremendous heroism in the firefighters, police officers,
and ordinary citizens who gave their lives trying to help others live. We've
seen an outpouring of personal generosity: people giving blood, comforting
their neighbors, collecting supplies. American Christians and Jews have held
vigils to help protect threatened mosques, and a Jewish family volunteered
to walk with a Muslim woman who felt threatened just stepping outside. For
the moment, we're common mourners: People seem careful, vulnerable, and
extraordinarily kind to each other. These events just might be able to break
us away from our gated communities of the heart.

But by itself, individual compassion won't create a just world. To do that
requires asking what common choices would respect the humanity of all human
beings-and then working to make those choices a reality.

This means acting in common, raising our voices, continuing to speak out no
matter how hard it becomes. We need to be kind to ourselves, and nurture our
souls while we act: whether through walking in nature, playing with
children, dancing to music, or communing with our God and the people we
love. We also need to take public action-including reaching out to those who
disagree with us on how to respond to this brutal cataclysm. Because from
what I've observed, there's ample common ground once we make clear we share
the goal of preventing these horrors from continuing to be visited on
innocent humans again. We need to act with enough faith and strength to keep
on raising the difficult questions, demanding paths that are both just and
wise.

If we really raise the hard questions, we'll probably take some heat and be
called some names. It might help to carry flags at our vigils and protests,
since true patriotism requires taking responsibility for the choices of our
nation.

We can never know every facet of this situation. We will not know every
detail of how our government responds. We may not know whether our actions
will prevail. But we need to speak out, whatever the obstacles or costs, for
our own human dignity. And also because this is the only way that the cycles
of vengeance have a chance of finally ending.

Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a
Cynical Time [St Martin's Press, www.soulofacitizen.org] and three other
books on citizen involvement with war, peace, and social justice issues.

Copyright 2001, Paul Loeb