Seven years ago today, religious zealots from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, operating out of Afghanistan, used box cutters to hijack three four airliners to knock down the World Trade Center buildings, damage the Pentagon, and kill almost 3,000 people.
Let’s all commemorate the dead and condemn the religious zealots.
Amen!
While we’re doing that, let’s also be clear that it’s quite debatable whether religious zealotry was the primary motivation for suicide terrorism that day– and it certainly is not the primary motivation for suicide terrorism in general.
I heartily recommend Robert Pape’s book on this. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright is also worthwhile. (I’ve blogged on Dr. Pape’s work, but haven’t gotten around to Wright yet.)
I was living outside Washington D.C. at the time. Very scary time. We had no clue what was going on – and we nearly bolted out of town until things calmed down a bit.
Lets also keep in mind that foreign policy decisions in the present have a long and lasting effect on the future. The nut jobs think that 9/11 was an inside job. They were partly right, they just didn’t go back in history far enough.
Doug… *four* airliners…
My mistake. I was thinking in terms of locations, but of course New York City was struck twice.
I was busy writing a funeral sermon for a twenty year old granddaughter of one of my members (who was killed in a one car accident on a nice, sunny day-they think she fell asleep behind the wheel) when we received news of the first plane hitting the north tower. (She also left behind a two year old daughter-and was a single mom. Her mother is raising that daughter.) We got the tv hooked up just after the second plane hit. The secretary and I looked at each other and both said, “This was no accident.”
I got to the funeral home and unfortunately the family already knew what was going on in our country. Leading that service was probably one of the toughest things I’ve ever done in my life. I even screwed up and let the funeral director play her favorite song after the sermon. It was Nelly Fortato’s (sp?) “I’m like a Bird;” which I had never heard before that day. The chorus goes, “I’m like a bird…I don’t know where my home is…I don’t know where my SOUL is.” (To this day I can’t stand that song-same thing with “Closing Time” which I heard for the first time when I was going to do a funeral for a young guy who died because he was drunk and walked into the side of a moving train.) I wanted to dig a nice hole in the cement and escape from everything-that funeral and what was going on in our nation-while that song played.
We went to the cemetery and then got back to the church for the funeral lunch. We set up the tv outside the fellowship hall-and mourners mingled between the two rooms.
We hosted an ecumenical service at our church that evening. Then I went home and held my sleeping son-who had just celebrated his first birthday three days earlier-while I watched the television into the wee hours.
BTW did you hear what Sarah Palin had to say about Israel attacking Iran? I nearly fell off the elliptical machine at the gym tonight when I heard what she had to say. Protect Israel at all costs-even if they are complete shits to the Palestinian people. Glad I’m not a Zionist Christian!
It occurs to me that you go to a lot more funerals than the rest of us. I suspect it tends to make a guy a little more reflective.
Incidentally — very, very incidental, you ever read an Orson Scott Card book called “Speaker for the Dead?” The book itself is of indifferent quality, in my opinion, but the concept is interesting. Upon death, a speaker gets to really know the decedent and then “Speaks for the Dead” – basically trying to talk for the person who died, telling their story, warts and all, from their perspective. Interesting concept.
Book two (Ender’s Game was book One) – wow, haven’t read those since they came out in the mid-80’s. I believe the series has since continued on for several books. Card can produce some really good stuff and then suddenly go off half-tweaked.
Rev,
“Imagine” is a song like that for some reason, many people that have faith in eternal life like to play for things like 9/11 ceremonies.
The first line is “Imagine there is no heaven”. While I love the music to that song, and the almost all of the other verses in that song, I just don’t understand why so many people that talk about their dead loved ones living in heaven would want that song played to reflect on their death.
I must have heard it on the radio 10 times yesterday. Honestly, imagining that there is no heaven isn’t high on my list when I think about 4,000 plus people being killed, but maybe that’s just me.
Wilco’s “Jesus Don’t Cry” was written prior to 9/11, but due to a contract dispute wasn’t released (on the excellent Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album) until after the attacks. But its lyrics (on top of somber, gorgeous instrumental backing) are just haunting.
The chorus:
“Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks, bitter melodies
Turning your orbit around.”
Other lyrics like:
“Don’t cry. You were right about the stars. Each one is a setting sun.”
Other references to smoking your last cigarette, etc.
I hear that song and imagine it is something a caller in the towers would have said on a loved one’s answering machine, to be found and listened to hours after his death.
And again, so weird for it to have been written months before it all happened. If you haven’t heard it, it’s worth seeking out. Maybe I’m totally missing the meaning, but when I heard it I had to flip over the carton and see when it was written because it was such a match to the mood of the occasion.
Let’s all commemorate the dead and condemn the religious zealots
Amen. And resolve not to forget what we felt at that time. Re-watching 9/11 footage is a useful exercise to honor the fallen and to remind ourselves that we were (still are?) more vulnerable than we imagined, and that there still are large numbers of organized terrorists who delight in attacks on civilians, and who actively plot to destroy our way of life. Mourn and remember our dead, because their deaths are a vivid reminder as to what can happen again, or worse, if we forget the past.
Correction, title is “Jesus, Etc.”
Doug,
No I haven’t read that book-but yes I often do feel like the “speaker for the dead.” While my primary job at a funeral is to speak words of hope and new life in Christ, coming in a very close second is speaking about a person who was loved and will be missed. (I had just started seminary when my Grandma Bailey died-and I was pretty pissed at her funeral because the sermon the pastor gave could have been for anybody. He barely said a word about her; and absolutely nothing about her life. That’s when I decided my funerals would always have a “personal” touch.) I do have to be careful with that, though. I had one funeral where the dad was an alcoholic. The alcoholic son was the only one I could get info from-and he spoke like the man was Moses or something-as did his skank girlfriend who I think was secretly in love with the dad. I toned it back a bit in my message but still talked about him as a loving dad. The daughter and her family slipped into the funeral just before I started my message-they didn’t even bother to go to the visitation the night before. When I talked about him as a loving dad, the daughter got tense. I later found out from one of my members-which was confirmed by a few others-that the dad had sexually abused her when she was a child. The family fell away from the church after the wife died of cancer at a pretty young age. To top it off, less than a year later, the skank left the son, and on Maundy Thursday he got drunk and lit himself on fire. He died the next day on Good Friday. I was much more cautious in the words I used to speak about him-because most of the happy memories the sibs had of him were more than fifteen years old.
Jason, “Imagine” is no different than all the Fundies who got orgasmic over “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison; until they realised the second chorus was “Hare Chrisna.”
T, I’ll have to find that song. Bet it’s on YouTube.