As I prepare to speak at the Baltimore Ethical Society on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I struggle to make sense of the tragedy.  I offer these thoughts to ESWoW visitors in the hope that they may allow more meaning and ethical commitment to grow from this wound in America’s psyche.  The image of a wound came to me again this past July when staying in my cousin’s Battery Park apartment before speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  As I headed uptown toward the Society that Sunday morning, I passed “ground zero”  - the site where once stood the twin towers.  Although most of the refuse and jagged metal had been removed or buried, the site struck me as a giant aching wound in the cityscape.  Today, September 11, a public memorial site opens there with two huge sunken reflection pools marking the footprint of the disappeared buildings in which so many died.  The pools are cut into the ground, and water pours like the tears of family members and friends of the deceased. 

As I drove by, I was reminded of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., which knifes into a soft grassy knoll next to the Lincoln Memorial.  I recall her saying that she wanted to cut the earth, revealing a wound that slowly heals but never fully disappears.  Like Vietnam, the 9/11 horror of ten years ago will never go away.  Like ground zero in lower Manhattan, it will always ache with deep and powerful suffering. 

It trying to appreciate any grand tragedy, I am reminded of a quote attributed – perhaps apocryphally – to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic." These words might serve as a rationalization of a brutal man attempting to minimize the individual tragedies by setting into the sweep of grand historical forces – necessary sacrifices a part of the fortunes of class war. 

For me, however, this quote represents the human inability to appreciate fully the suffering and death of many.  It is much easier to get wrapped up in the death of a single person. This explains at least in part why the Casey Anthony trial hypnotized so many in this country – little two-year-old Caylee’s fate was tragic.  Yet the statistic that 10,000 children a day die of starvation or hunger related diseases remains – in the minds of many of us – just a statistic.

That is why in even trying to process the reality of 9/11 it is so important to remember the names of each individual lost.  Ever since 2001, on the anniversary of the attacks, a list of all those lost are read out loud at Ground Zero.  Watching this on television, I find it deeply moving.  Rosemary Cane, who lost her 35-year old firefighter son on 9/11, hoped that this tradition would continue.  She said, "He deserves to be remembered as George," she said. "[The 9/11 victims] are not a number.  They all had lives, hopes and dreams, and they deserve to be remembered individually."

The importance of the unique worth of every individual is central to Ethical Culture.  No one should be reduced to a statistic.  I remember many Memorial Day weekends that I visited the Vietnam Memorial on the mall.  The sight of a stranger touching the cool black marble, gently tracing the lettering of a relative’s name, still shakes me.  I think it a good thing that central to the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan are the names of those lost inscribed on bronze parapets surrounding reflecting pools.

Today, when in trying to make sense of the suffering of so many, I know I am lucky not to have known personally any individual killed by the terrorist attacks.  I cannot pretend to know what this anniversary means for those less fortunate.  I can only touch on the pain that turned their lives inside out.  So, in trying to answer the question, “What have we learned about the intersection of humanism and terrorism?” I speak from a sheltered perspective. I didn’t lose a loved one in the flames, falling concrete and twisted steel.  And unlike others, I do not wait nervously at home for the next e-mail from a son or daughter waging a so-called “war on terror” in Iraq or Afghanistan.  My story, like many of yours, begins through the buffer of television news coverage on that fateful day.

It was a strange feeling, sitting in the waiting room at Children’s Hospital in Washington, watching the silent television screen.  My nine year-old daughter Maya was to have the bright pink cast removed from her arm on September 11, 2001. Other children, as oblivious to the news report as she, played contentedly with Leggos and plastic cars.  Meanwhile, a room full of parents sleepily tried to make sense of the visuals.  Someone suggested turning the volume up, while others dismissed it all as just another news story of a building fire 500 miles away.

When the second plane hit the tower, cell phones emerged, despite signs prohibiting their use.  Conversations between strangers exchanged information, but remained hushed in tone, like in a library. There seemed to be a brief silent conspiracy to shelter the children from the growing horror. I know I wanted to shield my precious, delicate daughter so innocent against the backdrop of human atrocity.  And now, as she noticed how adults suddenly seemed so attentive of the television screen, she began cradling the cast that protected her fragile little arm.

When a woman by the door announced that a plane had hit the Pentagon, adrenaline surged in me: “What was going on?”  Someone said that more planes were en route to other targets.  Capitol Hill was mentioned, and I thought of my wife who would be arriving there for work as we spoke.  I tried calling her, but the cell phone frequencies were of course jammed. Then, over the hospital loud speaker crackled something like, “Code blue.  Code blue.  All personnel on site please report to your stations and prepare for arrivals.”  It felt like a bad dream.

I steadied myself and refocused on Maya, who by now knew something was very wrong.  Without denying the reality unfolding around us, I continued to want to protect her from the arising ugliness.  After all, it seems harder these days for children to remain children.  Carefree amusement and laughter is crowded out by busy schedules, materialism, and doomsday reports of war and climate change.  I wanted her to be able to remain young and innocent – to continue playing.

A slight smile creased the corners of my mouth when I remembered the silly circumstance of an earlier broken arm.  A couple of summers back Maya broke her arm in a game of “duck, duck, goose!”  Yes, in the heat of kiddie competition, an over-zealous fellow camper sat on her arm.  And now, this second fracture was the result of a simple game of soccer with a cousin.  Even though both cases were the result of play, and neither were particularly serious, my wife and I winced at our stoic little girl downplaying her injuries. 

It was hard to downplay what was unfolding before us on the news, however.  We had entered into a new phase of living it seemed. Childhood games would have to be put aside.  Parents would have to explain the harsh reality to our children without stealing away their youthful joy and love of celebration.  A decade of headlines about the “war on terror” made this difficult.  And now, ten years later, conversations will occur again. How will we explain it all to children born after 9/11?  How will we continue to make sense of it to ourselves?