“Whisper to them as they slip into sleep, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ ”

- William Rivers Pitt

I didn’t spend much time yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that with the news media’s seemingly incessant recounting of the horrors that occurred a decade ago.  I didn’t watch the remembrance ceremonies or listen to stories of those lost, those who survived and those who were heroes.  Instead, I spent most of the time as I have most of the past decade—ruing that which we have become since the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center.

It’s not that I don’t care, because I do.  But I can’t help asking how we can spend so much time, money and effort memorializing the 3,000 people who died on that tragic day, while giving only minimal lip service to remembering the nearly 5,000 Americans who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq in the ensuing 10 years.  The 5,000 deaths are no less tragic simply because they didn’t all occur on the same day.  And, in America at least, we speak nothing of the 2,700 other international forces who have died supporting our inane wars, let alone the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have died violently since our invasion.

But it is not just the deaths for which I mourn.  I mourn for what the decade has cost us.  Not the $1.5 trillion that could have been used for schools, teachers, roads, job training and other things we so desperately need, but what we have lost of our national character.  Because 9/11 turned us into a nation of fear and a people who have decided we are willing to give up the cherished freedoms for which our forefathers fought in order to convince ourselves we are somehow more secure.

Sometime between 8:45 a.m. on 11 September 2001 and the end of President Bush’s speech on 20 September, many Americans began living in fear, a fear that has allowed our government to usurp our Constitutional rights granted under the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments and Section 9 of Article 1 (the right of habeas corpus).  We somehow sleep better because we have tortured both guilty and innocent people.  And we are willing to let the government intrude where it could not previously have gone before without a warrant because those who invoke these measures reassure us it is only done with proper oversight.  This despite over 1,000 documented, unprosecuted abuses of the so-called Patriot Act and its bastard offspring.

We have seen a resurgence of hate in our national character.  It was never dead, but it had been much more muted since we came to grips with the rights of all people regardless of race in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Our national hatred now has as its target anyone who bears some vague look about them as someone who might be a follower of Islam.  This hatred manifests itself in the seemingly never-ending vitriolic rhetoric emanating from right-wing talk shows; in the bombing of mosques; in good old-fashioned vandalizing that would have done the cross-burning Southern haters of Negros proud; and in the materials released to the media by those seeking election to our national house of ill repute, and by that I mean Congress.

We even have members of Congress who feel it appropriate to hold hearings into the “radicalization of Islam in America,” hearings that are right out of the McCarthy handbook for searching out communists.  But no one ever holds hearings into the “radicalization of Christian Fundamentalists in America.”  That, of course, is because we are a Christian Nation.  So it’s okay for Christians to hate, for Christians to burn books other religions consider holy, for Christian politicians to publicly flaunt how much they pray and criticize those that don’t put in an equivalent amount of time on their knees, for Christian pols to turn their backs on the “lazy” poor and for Christian wealth to prosecute an economic war on the American middle class.  The list could go on, but I think you get my point.

This is not the Christianity I was taught as a child.  I was taught that the Christian God loved everyone equally and that I was no better or worse than anyone else because of my faith.  I was taught that we were to stop and help the injured at the side of the rode instead of passing by with unseeing eyes.  I was taught that instead of meeting violence with violence, we should turn the other cheek.  I was taught that God gave us a brain and an inquiring spirit so we could grow as we expanded our understanding of the world around us, not so we could retreat into a cocoon of “faith” that denies science.

But the single item that distresses me most is that we now have children in the 5th grade who have known no other world.  To them, this is how the world is.  These children have never known a country that was not in an economic recession, for before it toppled almost two years ago, their country’s economy had been tottering on its feet like a punch-drunk prizefighter for the previous eight years.  Theirs is a country that has always tapped phones in secret, always imprisoned people without trial or due process of law, always tortured, always lived in a cocoon of fear and hatred that serves to justify virtually any act, no matter how barbarous or criminal or wrong.  Politicians, in their world, have always used threats of terrorism to frighten, to control, to change the subject, to win elections, and to make money for themselves and their friends with no consequences for such vicious acts.  For these children, it has always been this way.

How will they ever learn that it doesn’t have to be this way?  We all know children learn infinitely more by what they see than by what they are told, so unless we very soon see some sort of Christian miracle that can change the nation, change who we have become, to show them the better angels of our nature buried beneath the tarnish of our Brave New World, they are doomed to a life in which today is the norm.

Perhaps our Christian politicians should begin praying for such a miracle.