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Keith N. A. Best
September 11, 2001
Highjack a plane? Commonplace. Fly it to Cuba? Any day. Pilot it into the
World Trade Center? Unthinkable!
On September 11, 2001, the unthinkable did happen: the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon were successfully attacked. The U.S. took the worst hit on
American soil ever, nursed its wounds and buried its dead. Life returned to normal as Americans returned to the duty of living, but an umbrella of invulnerability no longer canopied the American skies; a threat of follow-up attacks loomed in it's place, the apprehension of it forever embedded in the American psyche.
It seems no more than yesterday that those numbing images burned themselves
into our memories: a plane slowly approached one of Gotham’s twin towers and
the world held its breath . . . waiting . . . hoping . . . for a ‘cut and print’ command,
perhaps? Anything but what slowly was becoming inevitable: a contact that
would take thousands of lives–and change the world forever. But those
strapped to their seats were trapped by a real-life situation – with little
else than a prayer that somehow, they might survive the contact.
How mean and horrifying the choices: heat so intense, it would melt the
steel structures and bring the towers crashing down on so many; a reach for
the soothing sky, several more succulent breaths of precious air and a hard,
conclusive landing on the cold pavement below. That doomsday scene of
anonymous members of the race, blanketed by gray soot, racing away from a
crumbling, deafening implosion and the turmoil it created are unforgettable.
And after fervent prayers, those forced into live appearances at their own vigils in subterranean tunnels below, finally accepted their fates, surrendering peacefully as faint heartbeats drummed them farther and farther on their way. Above, grateful for the gift of life to carry on, a shaken neighborhood, drenched in humility, took a few tentative steps and began moving on with the business of living . . . without them.
For several weeks following September 11, the events of that day lingered on
in my memory as a newsflash of some disaster in a place far away. About
three weeks later, with New York still in a daze, I took a walk along the
Clifton end of Clove Road that intersects with Targee Street on Staten
Island, New York. I was headed for a small shopping center down that street, looking for advertising for the Staten Island Chronicle, a 20-page
community newspaper launched only weeks before.
Looking ahead, I spotted several fire service vehicles parked as usual on the island that created the two-way lane at that end of Little Clove Road. Fire Ladder No. 81 stood nearby on the right. Across the street, two lanes over, lay the entrance to the service road that led to the Verazzano Bridge that connects Staten Island to Manhattan. Fire trucks had sped across the giant bridge that fateful day, ferrying men responding to the call. Very few from that precinct would make the trip back across the Verazzano to their homes and loved ones.
Approaching the station, the largest display of candles and flowers I had ever seen arrested me. Something twitched in my belly and I felt a gradual buildup that soon would creep up my chest, invade my throat and steal my voice. A knot welled up in my throat and I found myself surrendering, welcoming the release of emotions I didn’t know were trapped inside of me. Through almost blinded eyes, I reached out and clasped the hand of the lone fireman in sight, and it hit me how much the local community had lost. 9/11 was real, not a television bulletin about some incident in a faraway place; and I was a part of it:
They died . . . and we died too—
A part of us: our heart.
Yet, they went as though they knew
What their courage would impart
To the village: a new hue—
A fresh phase . . . a stronger start!
One by one, they took their cue.
As they faced the hate-filled fire,
Every smoke-filled breath imbued
All with a burning, new desire;
Those that waited in the ‘pews’
As Beamon “rolled” the fight on high,
Those that passed up life for others,
Those that braved the soothing sky,
Those that bared their breasts below
As fiery darts rained from the sky,
Those that kept the faith, entombed
Beneath the smoldering funeral pyre:
They paid the price—their due—
To ignite a broader start;
They bonded us anew,
A sterling work of art;
They were the ‘chosen few,’
Forged us a steely heart
No fire can assail
With Him we will prevail.
—“One Nation, Now One Heart” By Keith N. A. Best, October 11, 2001
__________
My response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack had begun with a
stark replay of an activity involving my daughter, Kimberly, at the age of
four. She was leading her class in reciting a poem during a 1994
closing exercise at the Rose Garden Head Start Program in Smyrna, Georgia. I had
written the poem in 1983, while sitting in on a discussion of the
“International Year of the Child.” In an earlier book, that poem, “The World is A
Child,” was prefaced by the hope that my grandchildren would inherit an
environment as idyllic as that depicted by the poem; the relative innocence
of that era, still intact:
I am the flower,
I am the fruit.
I become the tree,
I spread my roots.
I bridge the world,
I build it high.
I cross the ocean,
I scan the sky.
I climb the mountains,
I roam the wild.
Who am I?
I am the child!
The harrowing events of 2001, beamed into the consciousness of thousands of other eleven-year-olds like Kimberly, would help shape their world for years to come. Many barely older than she soon would begin offering up liberty, limb and life in defense of what they believed and honored. One day it would be her turn to take a stand. Kimberly had moved on after 9/11, a bit wiser since her earlier fascination by that uneventful poem she often recited and had come to love. She remembered the poem only vaguely now, her world no longer the way it once
seemed. “You know something, Dad?” she asked one day, with a bit of nostalgia, “Now,"
I’m a ‘9 -1-1’ flower,
A ‘9-1-1’ fruit—
A scion of twin towers,
A fighter ‘to boot.’
I have lived through my anguish,
God has strengthened my roots.
Al Qaedas? Hamas? Osamas?
I will vanquish the brutes!
With terror as my target
And “Let’s Roll” as my cry,
I will comb all our oceans,
Take back all our skies.
I will scale every mountain,
I will tame the great wild.
Let the world mark my coming—
I’m the ‘9-1-1’ child!”
As she spoke, my mind drifted, panning into view an equally direct commentary: George W. Bush, that poster child for corporate greed and its uncompromising dictates, pledging in an outdoor speech shortly after 9/11, to take the fight to the enemy, wherever that enemy might be found. As fighter-jets screeched overhead, millions watching on television, the most powerful man in the world peered skyward over one shoulder, lowering his head protectively in the event something fell from the sky.
Another take: Standing on a square-foot of the most secure soil in the world, backed by the office once occupied by the intrepid Teddy Roosevelt, George Bush surrendered his swagger, settling for a crouch that the now-ominous sound of planes flying overhead dictated; his own planes, in his own backyard. That public betrayal of insecurity, however momentary or imperceptible, gave proof of an interest more vital than all the trade surplus, gold or oil reserves in the world: self-preservation. A new era was born!
__________
About two years later, fresh from cutting his teeth in Iraq, an humbled
George W. Bush announced he had glimpsed, however fleetingly, what the L.A. Times called “a broad vision of an American mission to spread democracy
throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, divining that ‘freedom
can be the future of every nation!’”
Some called it an attempt to improve
his chances for re-election in an election year; others, a move to legitimize
the campaign in Iraq, reconfiguring it as an important part of the ‘war on
terror;’ a few, however, dared to hope it nothing less than a sober response to a
rudely-dictated step back in time, to reconnect with what many Americans
have long regarded as their mandate to blaze and broaden the trail of
liberty.
Historian Gary B. Nash wrote in American Odyssey: “Like the Puritans and the believers in Manifest Destiny . . . many Americans felt they had a mission: to build a free world with the United States leading the way.” Walt Whitman earlier took up the refrain that the U.S. would come to speak of all mankind as ‘one nation under God,’ hopefully, ‘with liberty and justice for all’:
Sail—sail thy best, ship of Democracy!
Of value is thy freight—'tis not the Present only,
The Past is also stored in thee!
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone—not of thy western continent alone;
Earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel, O ship—is steadied by thy spars;
With thee Time voyages in trust—the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee;
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bear'st the other continents;
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant:
But a century earlier, as the U.S. founding fathers hammered out their principles
of American Democracy, an engine that would help transform the U.S. into
today’s cutting-edge technological giant cornering the economic leadership
of the world was being readied. While those at the steering were not
quite the “outcasts and deracines” that the pre-capitalists of the English Industrial Revolution had been, these rising American capitalists were no less driven by the lure for personal wealth and the benefits it brought.
Looking across the landscape, as the modern capitalist market came into sharper focus, the
father of economics, Adam Smith, saw that the marketplace could indeed
become a thing of beauty if allowed to work itself out to the finest degree
as "a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society."
"No
society can . . . be flourishing and happy [when] the greater . . . numbers are poor and
miserable,” said he, almost applauding the potential of that breed
to increase “the universal opulence [that] extends to the lowest ranks of
all the people."
Smith’s cautionary postscript:
"
to what purpose . . . the toil and bustle of this world . . . the end of avarice and
ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and pre-eminence? The Wealth
of Nations provides his answer: all the grubby scrabbling for wealth and
glory has its ultimate justification in the welfare of the common man."
After further dissecting that movement, though, and isolating greed as its
fuel, Dr. Smith cautioned that members of that class possessed of that
“mean rapacity” dynamic “neither were, nor ought to be, the rulers of
mankind.” That species eventually would assemble an economic juggernaut with
which they would overrun the planet and compel it regurgitate its wealth into
their laps. And the world society has not been the same since.
In their push for coveted economic leverage abroad, western business
interests, with an assist from their governments, targeted opportunities and
moved quickly to secure access to coveted raw materials. In the process,
they staked out markets for their finished products.
On the ground, they
negotiated or strong-armed fabulously favorable concession agreements drawn
up between developing societies’ ruling elites and themselves. The
arrangement remained simple but effective: dole out millions to third-world
agents and their hirelings. The money soon returned, exchanged for imported
guns that terrorized Third World masses into ‘stability,’ or simply as
stashes in Swiss and later, U.S. bank accounts, with little effect on developing the
local terrain or its people. The two would operate together profitably for
decades.
And then it dawned on the Bush administration in 2003, that the time had
come for America to take stock and perhaps, to give account of its blessings; that America’s military might and economic capacity might not, after all, be ends in themselves, but tools to a higher calling. Proclaimed Mr. Bush: "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our
country . . . and we believe that freedom, the freedom we prize, is not for us
alone. It is the right and capacity of all mankind, with all the tests and
all the challenges of our age, this rises above all, the age of liberty."
That revelation would have warmed Ralph Ellison’s heart. The author of Invisible Man long dreamed that American society would one day reach
back for and reclaim its ‘first avowed intent’ to bear “a much greater
responsibility for the condition of democracy [to guide] a nation
whose true goal was not simply material well-being, but the extension of the
democratic process in the direction of perfecting it."
The timing of George Bush’s call for liberty and justice for all of the
world’s people raised some curiosity, though. In the past, whatever claimed
America’s interests outside of its borders turned largely on what supported
important U.S. security and economic objectives. Axiomatically, freedom
American-style would come to mean a variety of things for the people to whom it
was exported.
This excerpt is from the forthcoming book, The Politics of Poverty:
Challenges to the West in the Era of Terror - The Case of Liberia
By Keith Neville Asumuyaya Best
Copyright © 2007 Keith Neville Asumuyaya Best
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