How to begin.  Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania.  Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred.  I paid scant attention throughout the day due to the press of mundane responsibilities.  In 2001, those events seemed abstract, strange and unreal to me.  Even now the attack feels unreal.

However I heard a reported fragment of the oration delivered by former President George W. Bush at Shanksville Pa.  I’ve thought about his words:

All that many people could initially see was the brute randomness of death. All that many could feel was unearned suffering.

Is not death always random?  Is it ever the case that you and I are handed a number and given a place in line, an appointment to await our turn to depart this life?  That is never the case.  The deaths of 9-11 were not exceptions to that rule.  Mercifully it is impossible to be certain of how much time one has left.   Even with a serious, incurable illness we do what we can to stay here as long as life can be nurtured, as long as reason and sanity are intact, as long as the pain can be relegated to background discomfort by narcotics.  Life is precious especially for the sake of the solicitude that we share with others.

Death is always random, because we cannot know it’s time, when the curtain will fall. 

What was and is irrational, the surd-like atrocity of the deaths in Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field —  that they were mass deaths, arranged by design.  The suicides which involved 2,996 innocent office workers, airline travelers were acts in response to the hegemony of empire.  “Empire,” that Victorian-era word that we’d rather not say out loud:  the bid to dominate for economic benefit nations and societies other than one’s own. 

Empire and blow-back, a cause and effect,  an antiphonal call and response, a uniquely human dance of death, — or so it seems to me.  The response to the crime of 9-11 was the predictable act of a declining empire.  President George W. Bush initiated a war that was to last for 20 years involving Iraq and Afghanistan, a war as calculated as were the four airplane suicide attacks of 9-11. 

Since 2001, add to the butchers bill of the 2,996, — another 171,000 to 174,00 in Afghanistan, and another 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion by US forces.

There’s nothing left to say.

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This tune seems appropriate for our situation…  Have Mercy, down the road that I must travel, through the darkness of the night.

Kyrie
by Mr Mister