[Think] On September 11th

[Vinessa Nevala]

Friends, as we move through the grieving and recovery process, a few
more thoughts to share:

Though we are the oldest continuous democracy in the world, we are a
relatively young country.

On September 11th, 2001, America's adolescence ended.  We will look back
on the 1990's as a decade rich in business and technological innovation
but also a decade that represented our last convulsion of materialistic
self-absorption.  We thought life was about stock options and portfolios
and which Pentium processor we had in our laptops, which model of Palm
Pilot we had, which cell phone and how quickly we could blast up the
ladder of success.

On September 11th, 2001, we got an inescapable reminder that safety is
transient and illusory, that life is fragile beyond description, that no
amount of wealth or position can guarantee we will live till tomorrow,
that there is nothing more important than being deep in the eyes of our
loved ones every single day as much as we possibly can.

On September 11th, 2001, we learned that what makes America so precious
is not merely our individual freedoms but the fact that those freedoms
have given rise to a national community of bountiful diversity.

On September 11th, 2001, we learned we all belong to this national
community and it belongs to us.

On September 11th, 2001, we learned that efficiency, productivity,
supply-line management, outsourcing, just-in-time production,
cost-reduction, downsizing, the almight bottom line, the Fourteen
Points, the Seven Habits, the Six Sigmas and the Five Disciplines are
the MEANS, not the end.  The end is freeing more time to be deep in the
eyes of our children, our spouses, our brothers and sisters and mom's
and dad's, grandmas and grandpas, extended family, friends, neighbors
and the folks we interact with every day of our lives.  The end is a
child-centered, family-centered, heart-centered national community of
people who veil their faces and unveil them as they choose, who wear
funny hats and no hats, funny face hair and no face hair, whose belts
are loaded like high-tech bandoleros with pagers, palms and cell-phones
and who wear no belts and refuse to use technology.

On September 11th, 2001, we learned we each have a responsibility to
look in the mirror for all traces of judgment and bigotry against our
fellow Americans and against our fellow man and take up our full
responsibility of citizens of this nation to cleanse ourselves of these
dark stains.

On September 11th, 2001, we learned we should go out of our way to make
sure Americans in Saris and Turbans are being treated like the Americans
they are.

On September 11th, 2001, a new possibility emerged, the possibility
that, as Martin Luther King said, we can rise up and live out the true
meaning of our creed...that all men are created equal...and that even if
a man is a Muslim in Egypt or Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraqi, he is
not "the other" we can more easily kill.  He is not "collateral
damage."  He is not an "unfortunate non-combatant."  These are other
forms of bigotry that make it easier for us to kill.  By all means,
bring justice to the evil or the evil to justice. But a mother who loses
her child as "collateral damage" in Kabul weeps no less, hurts no less,
has a heart no less broken than a mother in New York City.  As one old
Jewish joke goes...when a rabbi asked God why it was so difficult to get
along with strangers, God replied, "Strangers?  I don't make strangers.
You make strangers."

On September 11th, 2001, we discovered the possibility that if we can
make coalitions for war, we can make coalitions for peace, we can bind
together with the other leaders of the free world and bring all our
focus, all our economic, political and spiritual leverage to bear on the
most difficult conflicts on this planet and, without imposing solutions,
insist that there will be solutions, that conditions that give rise to
broken souls that want to lash out at the rest of the world, that such
conditions are unacceptable anywhere on the planet.  The Japanese,
Germans and Italians tried to take over the world bearly a half century
ago.  We defeated them and then helped them rebuilt their societies.
Must people declare war on us, then lose for us to mobilize all our
resources to help them raise themselves from the mud? When President
Bush said, we have found "our mission and our moment"...his words were
perhaps truer than he realized.  Our mission and our moment are beyond
merely stamping out the immediate causes of terrorism.  We will largely
succeed at that, but never win the war without going to the root
causes.  Our mission and our moment is to shuck off our national
adolescence and rise up and embrace the full potential of our leadership
right here in our individual lives and as a nation in the life of the
world.

It begins in the mirror.  It moves to the mirror of our children's eyes,
then to reconstructing our lives, the lives of our companies, towns,
cities, nation and ultimately the world around love...the ownly viable
response to hatred and the one every major religion espouses.  We've
talked a good game till now but we've been deeply conflicted in our
addiction to materialism. We can have things without being owned by
them.  Time to live out the true meaning of our creed.  Starting now,
this day.  To do less, would be to dishonor our fallen brothers and
sisters and miss the most bitter-sweet critical opportunity of the last
56 years.

May you all find the strength to stay conscious, to live in an enduring
sense of fragility...and then begin the work.

Bob Kamm,
author, The Superman Syndrome