The Truth Shall Set Them Free
Sep 15 '01 (Updated Sep 17 '01)
The Bottom Line Children, like everyone else, are owed the truth. They must be comforted, they must be armored against easy bigotry, and they must also understand that just retribution will prevail.
It was, I suppose, inevitable.
Once the shock receded slightly.
After the immediate echo ceased to reverberate.
While choking dust yet swirls and the dread halitus of charred flesh, corruption, and aviation fuel still hangs heavy.
The question, What do we tell the children. It too hangs upon our soured air.
Yet the answer is shockingly simple. We owe children, as we owe anyone and everyone, the truth. Certainly, parts of it may be difficult to explain to them in a way in which they can understand. But they are owed the truth. Not merely for prudential reasons (they'll eventually catch on, your credibility is at issue, they may live the next five or so years under conditions dictated by Tuesday's criminal acts...): they are owed the truth because honesty is paramount. Honesty is not 'the best policy,' said a great and good man, it is not a matter of policy. The honest man is honest because it is in his character to be honest. We'll be needing that virtue in the days to come, and such exemplars as the man whose maxim that was.[1]
Mind you, that shockingly simple thing is going to be damnably difficult. Not because events are not clear, but because thinking has so long been anything but.
The first steps are easy enough, tailoring the form - not the content - of the explanation to the child's capacity.
Today, for example, is Holy Cross Day.[2] It is also, by Presidential proclamation, a day of prayer, of mourning and remembrance. But it is also, simply, a Friday, and as such, on this day as on every Friday (and indeed, on every day, in varying degrees), men and women: Americans, or residents whose sympathies are wholly with America and all she stands for: Americans of the Muslim community will as they ever do prostrate themselves before the All-Merciful, praying for peace and healing and justice, for our common country and its peoples and leader. Just as on Saturday, Americans who are Jews will invoke the Name of God and lift their imploring souls before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Just as on Sunday, Americans who happen to be Christians of various sorts - doubtless including some lax and nominal Christians suddenly shocked back into the pews - will intercede for us all in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Children must learn that human goodness and loyalty to this nation have a myriad of faces, of all colors and origins, of all creeds and none. They must be shown - not merely told: shown - that (as exemplified by their parents) human virtue is not the exclusive possession of any sect or any group of people.
They must also be told, honestly, that evil is likewise not the peculiar quality of any one set of folks, of any claimed religion, of any national origin or confession of creed.[3] When there is compelling evidence that indicates who are the mass murderers of the 11th September, children must be made to understand that whatever face or cloak the criminals give their deeds is but a mask, and that the bestial crimes these vermin have committed - be they middle Americans with Ulster Scots surnames or Middle Easterners with no Western-style surnames at all - are not the function of their background or of the religion they profess (and have betrayed and disgraced) or of anything but their own abuse of their own free will.
Too, it is necessary that children, in some fashion, are made to comprehend the enormity of Tuesday's evil. Purely visually, the endlessly shown video of the destruction of the Towers looks like a special effect ILM would have won an Oscar for. Regrettably, children need to know that it was not buildings and planes that were killed, but people, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. For their own sake and safety in the days ahead, and in simple honesty, they do - lamentably - need to know this. Only warfighters are allowed the psychologically needful shield of thinking in terms of killing a ship, splashing an enemy aircraft, killing an enemy tank. Allowing that cotton-candy thinking to everyone else is part of what got this republic into this mess.
That much is simple enough, and comfortable to most folks who share in the common culture, and will largely get accomplished. It is after that point that the trouble begins.
The problem, frankly, is that further steps in teaching children the moral ABC are liable to founder on the moral ignorance of their parents, who cannot explain what they themselves do not understand.
I do not say this lightly. In such moments as I have had to spare since the sneak attack of Tuesday, I have, inter alia, seen people whose literary (and until now, general) judgment I respect stake out positions, on message boards and elsewhere, that upon reflection must surely embarrass them down the road. I have seen thinly disguised apologetics on behalf of the barbaric murders of Tuesday. I have seen moral relativism pushed to its logical conclusion, to the assertion of moral equivalence between the mass murders of 11th September and any possible response by the United States and their allies. Indeed, I have seen assertions of moral equivalence between the general policies of the United States and actions of these murderous thugs. I have begun already to see America blamed first. I have seen enough smug self-righteousness and disdainful 'sophistication' to last me for the term of my natural life.
This must cease, if there is to be any intellectu
al honesty left in the world. (I do not expect everyone to combine a background in the law with an expertise in military history. I do not expect them to have read Aquinas and Grotius on 'just war,' to understand the niceties of international public law, and so on. I do expect people to stop sermonizing on matters they know nothing about. I also expect them to learn: in a free society, it is not only the right but the duty of every citizen to inform him or herself of our core principles.)
In other words, if we're going to teach the children who have to live in this new world that was blasted into existence on Tuesday, a lot of adults are going to have to unlearn the putative lessons of the past thirty or forty years.
Let me pause here a moment. There has been a lot of good and a right smart of progress on a lot of issues in the past three or four decades. No one - no one sane - urges jettisoning that. But there's been a godawful lot of horse manure spouted, too. The freedom to spout horse manure is a sacred one under our Constitution, and I'll defend it in the last ditch; but there is no right to pretend that patent falsehoods are in fact truth.
One other point before I go on. I am not sitting here in a 'kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out'[4] mood, writing from some posture of comically afflated superpatriotism. This is so despite the fact that - like a staggering number of folks in our increasingly interconnected world - the hem of this heinous crime has brushed even my quiet life. I have classmates who worked on Wall Street (a synecdoche: let us say plainly, at or near the WTC) who are unaccounted for, and at least one who is missing-presumed-dead at the Pentagon. I know the family of the late Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General. And I hope I can say truthfully that I would be no more and no less filled with horror, sorrow, and grim, resolved fury had I no connection other than citizenship and common humanity to those who were killed. I am not waving the bloody shirt, here, nor am I overwrought. (As a matter of fact, it was not until Thursday, the 13th September, that I first shed a tear: it was when the Coldstream Guards, at Buck House, played The Star-Spangled Banner.)
Now. To home truths and brass tacks.
Dad? When you go to the office ... you're gonna be safe there, right?
Maybe not. Probably, yes. Materially, so far, the country is still largely safe. When we begin bringing war to those who brought it to us, things may change; but security measures will change commensurately, as they have done thus far. There's no need wantonly to frighten the kids, but they may as well recognize what was just as true a century ago, that Death is always just around the corner, for all of us. Equally, there's no point in panic: statistically - and this is a profound example of how counterintuitive statistics are - bu
t statistically, the likelihood that Mumsie and Dad will get home on time and alive is almost unchanged from what it was a week ago.
Why didn't God stop this, if He's so loving and so powerful? (Note: If this question is not relevant to your family situation, scroll on down.)
Because the cosmos was not created as a police state. Freedom exists. That includes the freedom to do wrong, knowingly. And that is what the folks responsible for this outrage did.
If we go after them, aren't we just as bad as they are?
No. A thousand times, No. There is such a thing as retributive justice. And there is a profound distinction between the lawful bearer of arms, the person entitled to the honorable name of soldier, and the terrorist. It is not uniforms, ranks and grades, weapons and drill that make a soldier or an army, but their just purpose and allegiance. The enforcement of international law, the expunction of mass murder and terrorist criminality, the securing of freedoms, the protection of the innocent: these are just causes, and one can no more compare the warfighter engaged in such causes to the terrorist than one can posit a moral equivalence between the Texas Ranger and the serial killer.[5]
But violence is always wrong! It never solved anything!
The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets.
I have a right to turn my own other check when the tyrants come for me, as Bonhoeffer noted, but I equally have a duty to resist by any means possible when the secret police come after my neighbor. When Czech partisans blew up Heydrich of the SD, they acted justly and violently.
If these people committed a crime, why are we talking about military action? Why don't we just arrest them and try them and stuff?
It is true that what happened on 11 September, 2001, was a criminal act. In fact, it was a series of interrelated felonies as long as a well-rope. But it was also an act of war. Not 'just' war, not legitimate warmaking, but war nonetheless. When Guderian's panzers rolled into Poland, it was a crime, as the Nuremberg Tribunal held: a violation of international law. But it was also war, and it required war in response to defeat it. When Pearl Harbor was attacked without a declaration of war, it was a criminal act.[6] But it was war, also, and war was required in response.
I'd like to believe that we could simply send a couple of Texas Rangers, heirs to the tradition of Rip Ford, Leander McNelly, Frank Hamer, and Red Burton, after whoever was responsible for these foul acts of abhorrent evil. But I'm not a fool. The proper and commensurate response to warlike acts is not the issuance of a warrant.
Am I going to be in danger?
We're going to do everything we can to make sure you're not.
Won't they come back at us if we go after them?
Frankly, they may. But they would anyway. You're safer, really, if we don't just roll over for these goons. And some things, some principles, are too important to roll over on, whatever the danger.
Aren't we just like them if we fight them by, like, taking out their leaders and stuff?
No. Count von Stauffenberg was a hero, not a villain, when he tried to kill Hitler.[7] Targeting these people individually is actually better - morally better - than just turning an entire country or two into a parking lot, innocent civilians included (though as just warriors in a just cause, we will do our best to avoid hurting the innocent in any event). Whoever the leaders and coordinators of the guilty group may be are just as legitimate targets as was, for example, Admiral Yamamoto, when we shot his plane down in the Pacific.
But didn't we bring this on ourselves?
Nope.
Don't people - in the Third World
and all, not just in Middle Eastern countries or the Islamic world or wherever - have a legitimate beef with us? Weren't they - I'm not excusing what happened - but weren't they driven to this by our globalism and our power and our capitalism and our always siding with Israel and being unfair to Muslims?
Okay, you are definitely getting tested for drugs, young lady.
There is no justification, there is no conceivable, imaginable justification, for what happened on Tuesday. None. The callous murder of what will surely be thousands of noncombatants, many of them not even American (if that's the beef they have with the civilized world), simply cannot be justified.
I might note that, precisely as we began in speaking of our diversity and our freedoms here, the last several times this country has sent its sons and daughters into harm's way, it has been to feed and aid Muslims in Somalia, to liberate them from an aggressor in Kuwait, and to keep a bunch of so-called Christians from shooting them in the Balkans. This country owes no apologies to the Islamic world.
Moreover, even if it transpires that the perpetrators of this abominable act hail from that world, they are no more entitled to be seen as legitimate representatives of Islam than various white supremacists represent actual Christendom. It is bigotry to suggest otherwise.
The victims of Tuesday's crimes may have been - from the perpetrators's perspective - killed over cheeseburgers and 'N Sync and Coke and the Yankee dollar and DVDs and our alliance with one of the few legitimate democracies in the Middle East, the State of Israel. They in fact died for freedom and liberty, for a world in which theocracies don't rule and religious and ethnic hatreds are not celebrated as virtues and people are free even to be idiots and eat too much and listen to Weezer and otherwise accomplish nothing in their lives, so long as they don't infringe on the rights of those of us who do stupid things and eat chateaubriand and listen to Bach and accomplish far too little with our own lives.
Still seems to me as if religion - perverted religion, okay, but still, religion - is at fault here. We'd be better off without it.
Rubbish. It is the function of religion to bind, as the derivation of the word suggests, to create a consistent body of thought that tempers justice with mercy, that preaches absolution even as it convicts us of sin. It was a failure to observe religion, not an adherence to it, that has driven such terrorists in the past, and may have driven those responsible for what has just happened.
Okay, so that's how we see it, but aren't they entitled to their own view?
As far as freedom of speech goes, certainly: as Jefferson put it, 'let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.'
As far as being taken seriously, of course not. There is a universal moral law. Everyone - with rare pathological exceptions - has a conscience (and is free to disobey it). No sane view of the world or humanity or what is just or what is right has any place in it for the mass murder of perhaps four thousand unsuspecting civilians.
This is not a cultural matter. All morally sane persons - and unless you are a bigot or a racist, you must accept that such persons exist in every creed and culture, are indeed the majority of every faith and folk - will agree on this principle. Nothing whatever can be adduced in justification of what occurred on 11 September.
But aren't we running the risk of giving up too many freedoms in trying to be safe? You know, like border crossings and airport check-ins and stuff?
I have yet to see an actual liberty at risk here. Conveniences are not freedoms - unless you're that idiot, Justice William O. Douglas. There's no particular Constitutional right to insist we leave our borders undefended while under assault, or to have curbside check-in at airports.
Um ... we're ... we are going to get through this. Right?
Yep.
It's hard to recognize just now, but we've gotten through worse. Even as recently as the Cold War, in fact.
It is an eerie coincidence that the remnants of the Trade Center, seen through the hanging dust, look so very like the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. But it speaks to a profound truth. The Blitz passed. Virtue and freedom triumphed. Children were largely saved even from the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of that vicious madman, Adolf Hitler; every effort will be made to safeguard our children in this new blitz.
We aren't going to let these people become our universal jailers, either. We are not letting the world be wagged by these dogs-in-the-manger. Even baseball will be back, as it was through both World Wars. We aren't going to let them win.
This is what, in sum, the young need to know.
-These were the evil acts of evil people. It doesn't matter what they try and say to justify it.
-These evil people don't represent whatever nationality, creed, or culture they turn out to have sprung from.
-Any other group could have generated these savages, too. We've peckerwoods of our own.
-We're not perfect ourselves, but we and all the civilized world - a term weakened by the adjective, 'Western': all civilized people, meaning everyone who renounces this evil - we are trying, and we will strike back, and we shall prevail.[8]
-No, it isn't going to be clean and pretty and sanitized by Hollywood and the video-game designers. Sorry.
-Yes, there are going to be some dangers and losses.
-We will do our dead level best to keep you safe, and ourselves safe too, for you.
-We are going to fight this, but it is fighting the good fight, and we will and shall fight it in such a way as to preserve our goodness and our freedoms.
-There are going to be some annoyances, but we are committed to not letting the bad guys win by our giving up our own real freedoms either. Conveniences, sure, but not our liberties.
-Life will go on. It's okay to be scared and to grieve and to be mad, and it's also going to be okay to cheer when Barry Bonds hits one out of the park or when Roy Oswalt or Billy Wagner ring him up and he strikes out swinging.
-We're here to talk when you need to. We're working through answers ourselves, but we'll do what we can.
-We are going to beat this. As the old Texas Rangers said, there is no power on earth that can stop a man who's in the right and keeps on a-coming; and we are in the right, and we shall keep on.
The vicious guttersnipes who rashly invoked war upon all civilization on Tuesday wrought far better than they knew: not for their cause, but for ours. We are united. We are in the right. We shall prevail.
___________________________________________
[1] The words are, of course, R. E. Lee's.
[2] Yes, I am a High Churchman. You noticed.
[3] Case in point: the Japanese-Americans were loyal to man in the Second World War. It was the German-Americans who produced a flourishing crop of traitors.
[4] Cardinal Arnaud-Amaury, at the siege of the Cathar stronghold of Beziers, during the Albigensian Crusades. He was speaking to Simon de Montfort at the time.
[5] I note that in part of this essay I am quoting from my own earlier essay on this site regarding Children and Violence.
[6] I note that some Japanese have expressed outrage that the events of 11 September, 2001, are being compared to those of 7 December, 1941. One complaint is that 'it was merely an accident, due to faulty communications, that the attack began before the Embassy delivered the declaration of war' (that was timed to precede the attack by a few scant minutes). This is offensive rubbish, and should be nailed for the lie it is. There was not so much as an attempt to declare war upon the British, against whom simultaneous attacks were launched, which shows a guilty intent, and the delayed message, had it been delivered before the attack, was not in any event a declaration of war, but at most a severance of relations. I confess I'm a trifle tired of this whitewashing.
[7] I do not use the term 'assassinate' when speaking of just tyrannicide.
[8] I will here pause to marvel at the statements of some of those who've suggested a moral equivalency between even the stupidest rock-chunking peckerwood and the terrorists of Tuesday. Certainly, Americans who are reacting by striking out at other Americans who look or dress or worship differently are scum, and need a major a-s-whuppin'. Certainly, it's a symptom of the same disease that in virulent form led to Tuesday's horrors, and needs to be nipped in the bud. But I am astounded that the very people who speak as if our response to what happened on 11 September should be indictments rather than infantry, cannot distinguish (or don't wish to distinguish) between classes of misdemeanor and felony, and mass murder. I suppose their legalism ceases when they see a shot at equating America, as the victim of aggression, with the aggressors.
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
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About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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