Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Tonight I am searching for understanding, not acceptance or forgiveness exactly, just enlightenment-balance. Everywhere, I hear anger, outrage and grief. Grief I understand but only feel after losing someone very close, my dearest friends ravaged by cancer, where the end is merciful if not swift. But then there is no one to blame. This is God’s will, we say.
Now the end of thousands of lives has been swift and violent, and grief gives way to blame, anger, hate. People who lost no close friend or relative in the attack on the World Trade Center are calling for revenge. They express not grief, only rage and perhaps a rekindled patriotism. This is America, they say. How dare they violate our space, blow up our buildings, kill our people?
In candlelight vigils they pray for the dead, the missing, the maimed and their loved ones. I’ve heard fewer prayers for guidance, wisdom for our leaders, only from a few academics, scholars who have devoted their lives to Middle East studies. Theirs is a more dispassionate view. They know all the saber rattling means nothing. It will not change the history of displaced peoples. It will not assuage their anguish. It will not change their view of us. We are isolated, protected by oceans, yet we meddle in their conflicts, take sides, support their enemies. How can they not, if only for a moment, cheer our comeuppance? “Finally, the arrogant Americans know what it’s like to be killed on their own streets,” they seemed to be saying.
This is war!, the headlines screamed. But who is the enemy? The analogy of Pearl Harbor is false. We knew immediately who did what on that day that would live in infamy. It was easy to rouse Americans to defend their country, to hate its enemies-Hirohito, Hitler. Who do we hate now? Nameless, faceless terrorists. They looked like Arabs. Must we hate all Arabs to win this war? How about those who have lived peacefully among us to escape the terrors of their homeland? Must we bomb a country that harbors terrorists, taking more innocent lives?
Until now, our view of people from other ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds was mostly based on individuals we met. For a while, I intensely disliked Iranians because the man who took over my local gas station was insufferably rude to me. I couldn’t understand how he could stay in business offending all his female customers. He couldn’t understand why women were driving cars in the first place. What business did they have coming into his station showing off their bare heads and legs and faces?
We offended each other. He had to get over it, I didn’t.
My friend lived and worked in North Africa making films for the United States Information Agency. He filmed in Tunisia and Libya, Morocco and Egypt. He loved the people. He blamed the British for relocating European Jews to Israel, displacing the Palestinians. His cameraman had grown up in Germany, joined the Hitler Youth and he was ready to captain a submarine because his country was at war. He wound up becoming a U.S. citizen, married a Danish girl and raised his children in upstate New York. His daughter works for the District Attorney’s office two blocks from the World Trade Center. We think of them only as American.
I grew up in Hollywood where dozens of European Jews found refuge during the war. It seemed the entire German film industry fled Hitler and wound up here, many changing their names to avoid discrimination. Hans and Claire Schwartz became Mr. and Mrs. Carl Sheldon and best friends of my parents. How could we hate Germans? Jews? Israelis?
I think I’ve met only one Palestinian. He was a nice looking, intelligent young man with a fair complexion, light brown hair and sad gray eyes, who came to hang the wallpaper in my kitchen 20 years ago. He was polite, a meticulous worker, and we talked while he cut and pasted and rolled. I asked him why he came to this country. He said the Israelis had commandeered the farm where he had grown up and the house that had been in his family for two centuries. “There was nothing left for me there,” he said. He had a degree in engineering, but could not find work here because of his name, which he would not change. He was an Arab. So he made a living the only way he could, hanging wallpaper. How sad, I thought. This nice man had so much to contribute, harbored no anger toward the hundreds of Jewish families whose walls he had brightened. Surely he was not capable of planting a bomb, hijacking a plane.
If we are now to wage war on “terrorists and the states that harbor them,” how will we know our friends from our enemies? Can we firm our resolve to find justice instead of revenge?
I pray we can protect our country without losing our humanity.