A morning streetcorner in Harlem. Rough dirty concrete. People headed down to Broadway and the No. 1 train or uphill toward CCNY.
Suddenly Lynora was standing next to me.
She was crying.
I hadn’t seen Lynora in a year, maybe a little longer, and here we were on this streetcorner, crying. Because now I was crying, too, and we recognized each other through our tears, and we just stood there a moment looking at each other.
There was no “Hi, how are you,” or “What have you been up to?” There were only tears–tears of rage and helplessness.
We’d both seen it on the newsstands. I’d read it in the paper on the subway coming uptown. I’d been holding myself together, but now, seeing Lynora, and it being so unexpected, I couldn’t keep the tears down any longer.
The news was from the Shatila refugee camp and the surrounding Sabra neighborhood in Beirut, half a world away. Following the withdrawal of PLO fighters, the Israeli Defense Force had surrounded and occupied the area. They blocked the residents from leaving and illuminated the area with powerful lights. Then the Israelis watched as Christian Phalangist militiamen did their work for them.
There were thousands of bodies, women and children, Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite. The UN General Assembly called it genocide.
This was 1982.
There was never any accountability for the mass murder. The Israelis, backed and armed by the United States, had been shelling and bombing Beirut all summer. They’d been collapsing residential high-rises with families inside. From June to August, they’d killed over 5,000 civilians–people just trying to live their lives and survive in the city. 300,000 had been left homeless. And now this.
I left Lynora standing there in the NYC drizzle, her back against the brick with the rough concrete at her feet. I called a hasty goodbye as I crossed the street. I had a class. I never saw her again. We’d been workmates for many years, and roommates for a while. Now we were headed in different directions.
Most Americans didn’t pay much attention to the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. Or to the corpses in the rubble of Beirut’s high-rises.
This is what we need to mourn on September 11.
I mean the not paying attention. The living in ignorant illusion.
The heart of that illusion is the unspoken, often unconscious belief that Americans (and particularly white Americans) have–that the suffering and death of those who aren’t us, who are outside our bubble of privilege, count for less. That the disparity in our own care and concern is part of a natural order of things.
(This is why we needed to remind ourselves, during that brief time in 2020, that Black Lives Matter. It’s also why, in the face of the inevitable backlash, many people shut up about BLM and stopped being so embarrassingly woke.)
Because living in ignorant illusion is the way to get along in the world.
Here’s the problem with that illusion: The hegemony of that world view, of that idea of the natural order of things, is slipping, bit by bit, year by year.
One of the slips happened when Osama Bin Laden saw the pictures of the bombed high-rises.
“The events that affected my soul,” he said later, “started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that.”
This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced. I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond. In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors. And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Bin Laden said this in a video that surfaced in 2004.
It wasn’t a surprise at the time. Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attack, it was clear that the motivation was anti-colonial.
Even now, 25 years later, many who live in the bubble cannot process this–they can’t bring themselves to admit it. In their deliberate cluelessness, they lose all ability to make sense of the world. They retreat into the same old belief that the suffering and death of the oppressed somehow counts for less.
Those clueless people have cost us. Because the same cycle keeps happening: Not paying attention, living in ignorant illusion, getting a wake-up call in the form of an attack within the bubble, reacting with denial and digging deeper into ignorant illusion.
The cluelessness of these people brought us endless wars abroad and fascism here within our bubble.
It keeps happening.
Not paying attention. Ignorant illusion. Denial about the US role in the world. Disparity in our care and concern over suffering and death.
That is what we must mourn on this 25th anniversary.