Star Foster made a thought-provoking post over at Patheos’s Pagan Portal about her take on 9/11. I could talk about her arguments all day, but the real piece that I want to talk about here is this: “Grappling with why our Gods allowed 9/11 to happen, allow any tragedy to happen, is key to our understanding of the event.”
Everyone has different experiences, and at 10 years ago, I doubt that my memories (or anyone else’s) will accurately capture our emotions on that day. However, my experiences have taught me that gods really don’t let things happen.
We live in a complicated world system. Many of the current weather conditions have been caused by our own inaction — as the world gets hotter, storms will get worse — but that’s not exactly popular with people in the middle of strong grief. Everything, including our mobility and comfort, comes with a price tag. A god may attempt to alleviate some or most of this if asked, but cannot change that we have brought on much of the pain ourselves.
9/11 was different because people with totalitarian ideologies made it happen. Now, it’s no secret that I don’t like the religious system of Islam — apparently my polytheism is a bigger sin than murder, and that’s no way to be friendly with neighbors — but I don’t think it’s any more harmful than Christianity. We could have taken more out of this experience by moving towards a more pluralistic society that recognizes our own darker tendencies, but instead a lot of people chose to demonize anyone who looked ethnically Middle Eastern and a lot of innocent Muslims were harrassed. Oh. And those of us who have French last names.
I don’t remember if I made any religious rationalizations on 11 September 2001.
My head and heart were in a completely different place back then. I was in 9th grade. We had been in school for nearly a month. The weather was still hot and sticky, and our rural Misourri school had no air conditioning.
9/11 happened after two years of brutal teasing that had spiraled me into a black hole of depression. Neither my home nor school environments offered any protection: my parents, who should have divorced years earlier, were still committed to staying together (probably for the children); at school, the teachers turned a blind eye to religiously-motivated harassment because no one really understood the host of risks associated with bullying and half of the teachers probably hoped the students would peer pressure me out of eternal damnation. And it wasn’t even my fault that our family had been outed — one of the girls next door had done it.
On the morning of 9/11 at 8:00 AM CST, I wandered downstairs and checked myself in my parents’ bedroom mirror. I was chubby and quite unattractive (and the shirt I wore made it worse), so I picked up the more slimming black shirt I owned showing the New York City skyline. It was still slightly damp from line drying indoors, but I didn’t really care.
I didn’t actually believe anything had happened until third period. Between first and second period, one of the assholes in my school said New York didn’t exist anymore because it had been blown up. I told him to get lost because I rarely swore as a child, and he was the sort of asshole who I wouldn’t have believed about anything. The beginning of third period (chorus) left me in a haze of confusion. We were going down to the library to watch television, but I didn’t know why it was important and the sub (who was the mother of the girl who had outed my family’s paganism to everyone at school) told us that yes, New York was gone. I still didn’t understand because New York is a pretty big state (and I am from Upstate) and that sounded impossible. Finally, she said, “Those two towers on your shirt don’t exist anymore.” I said, “Oh, you mean New York City.”
I didn’t even know what they were called. My mom hated New York City and spent a lot of time complaining about how stuck-up Downstaters were — they made crass jokes about us having no plumbing or all being hicks, and she generally found them offensive/annoying. She also wanted them to secede from the state because some of the legislators from Downstate do not seem to understand that Upstate NY relies on agriculture as the base of its economy. To this day, I have never visited it.
Most of the people I knew didn’t want to talk about it at lunch, but I did. I was appalled by the toxins billowing into the air. It never occurred to me that they hadn’t evacuated everyone.
My fellow students in high school called me unpatriotic at first, but soon I was also harassed. Because France was singled out following 9/11 and I am of French ancestry, I was actually called a fair number of ethnic slurs leading up to the invasion [of Iraq] in 2003, adding to the already toxic environment in my school caused by my not worshipping Jesus. The word “French” was replaced by “Freedom” on the official school menu, and liquor stores stopped carrying French wines (and anything they suspected of being French). This tapered off afterward, but I was still called slurs every so often until I graduated.
I tend towards the idea that the gods show less visible activity on a macrocosmic scale than in our individual relationships with each of them — we can’t really see their complete reach or where their attention points at any given time.
Furthermore, the gods probably don’t care about politics. They tend to gravitate towards specific types of people and influence their behavior (for good or ill) — and we don’t really know whether or not a god motivated the people who crashed in Pennsylvania to take their plane down or if a series of convenient delays kept the death toll at the Twin Towers from rising higher than it did.
We will probably never know, but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s a lot more complicated to untangle different pieces of cause and effect than it seems at first glance, and even more so to stop the dropping ball after it is already in motion.
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