ten years hence

It’s not even here yet and I’m sick of all of it, guilty that I’m feeling sick of all of it, yet obsessively reading the retrospectives and everybody’s accounts of where they were and what happened to them and how they felt … yet I too am remembering that day.

After I retired from my organizational change consulting business (that, unfortunately, didn’t really change any organizations), in the process of searching for my new place in the world I discovered Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat and study center in the next town over. I’d been going there for over a year, taking classes and, every weekday morning at 8:30, going to Meeting for Worship. When I got there, that sparkling September morning, the room was dark, empty. No one was there, no one arrived.

There was no Meeting for Worship that day – all the staff was on a retreat.

I went back home, and at around 10 of 9 Chip called. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers.

I never went back to Pendle Hill. God, if there was such a thing, was no longer there for me.

It was only after I’d told this dramatic story for a few years that I realized it wasn’t true. It all happened, but on different days. I’m not even sure of the sequence anymore.

This much I know is true: Benjamin, who was living here at the  time, and I watched the smoke and the flames and wondered why there weren’t any helicopters to rescue the people on the roof, until the towers fell. And then we realized there hadn’t been any people on the roof – they couldn’t get to the roof. I told him everything would be different from then on; that we were going to go to war. His generation had never known war.

Phoebe and her then-boyfriend, who had broken up at the beginning of that first year of med school, came here and held hands on the couch.

We had a comfort-meal dinner: meat loaf, potatoes, peas.

And then there was the Anthrax and the plane crash on Long Island and two wars and Bush and more Bush and yes, everything was different.

All these memories take us back to the time Before. On September 10, 2001, America was at peace, we did not torture, and comfort could still be found at Pendle Hill.

 

 

The Worst Decade, Part 2: The Year 2001

We were like stuffed geese that year, fat and unhappy with right wing values, environmental destruction, and massive tax cuts forced down our throats.

Little did we know how much worse things could get. Little did we know that the scared little boy reading The Pet Goat had, one month earlier, contemptuously dismissed the CIA agent bearing the warning “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Little did we know the anthrax attacks would never be solved. Little did we know Cheney and Rumsfeld were already planning the Iraq invasion.

I don’t think the foie gras turns out too well if you terrify the geese.

On November 22

My daughter was in her first year of medical school on that infamous September 11. Classes were cancelled, and she and her boyfriend came here. We all sat on the couch, watched television, and waited for our world to change.

I was in my first year of college on that infamous November 22. Classes were cancelled, and we all gathered in our dorm living room to watch the small black and white TV.

It was the end of an era, though we didn’t know it then. The escalation of the Vietnam War and the resulting antiwar movement, the counter-culture hippies, Johnson’s Great Society and the resulting right-wing backlash, all had roots in that day. And then the Baby Boomers grew up, and became rich, invaded countries, and started wars.

I wonder what was going to happen anyway, and what would never have happened, had Kennedy lived.

September 11, 2001

I spent a year taking classes at a Quaker retreat center near here. I’d go to Meeting for Worship each morning at 8:30, where everyone sat silently in “expectant waiting” for the presence of God, speaking, when they were moved, from the light of God within.

The room was plain, Quaker plain, but even when no one spoke, it seemed to radiate with a special energy.

One morning there was no one there when I arrived. The room was dark, even though the day was brilliant. It seemed cold, lifeless. I remembered there was a staff retreat off-campus that day, so there was no Meeting.

I went home. Chip called. A plane had hit the World Trade Towers.

It is from that day that I date my own religious retreat. Religious fanatics directed the attacks; our president and his controllers cynically used religion in their crusade against the evil-doers. Religious beliefs still divide and kill people every day in the countries we attacked.

On the scale of good and evil, I believe, without presenting any evidence, that religion weighs heavy on evil’s side.