This was originally written and posted on Sep 14, 2001, eight years ago today.
This morning it is raining in New York City. A cold hard rain that is, frankly, more in keeping with the mood here. It seems as though, after days of insulting us with her apparent insensitivity, Mother Nature has put aside those beautiful crisp Autumnal days and is shedding some tears of her own.
The news is blathering on telling us how we are standing together, a people united; thereby implying that human nature is, after all, intrinsically good. That may be true, but I am cold and my jeans are wet from the knees down where my umbrella fails to block the wind-driven rain and the honking horns all around me indicate to me that I’m not the only one moody, depressed, and deeply angry.
I have come outside to escape the confinement, the television I can’t turn off, and to find a cup of coffee to stunt this headache re-forming in my skull. The rain is knocking down the dust (and my concerns about asbestos) but it can’t eliminate the burning plastic insulation smell that occasionally skulks up from the south. The wind is expected to come around to the North as the rain passes through and I suppose that will keep the smell down for a while.
This morning the leader of The Moral Majority (even the name strikes me as an oxymoron at this moment) demonstrated his level of enlightenment by declaring our current crisis the result of our tolerance as a society for homosexuals and other sundry and miscellaneous sinners in our midst.
A few months ago a dance floor in Israel collapsed sending some 300 people attending a wedding plunging to their deaths. A noted rabbi concluded (a philosophical cousin of Jerry Falwell’s I presume) that they were being punished for dancing.
Both of these statements probably make a lot of sense to the people who made them, though I can hardly fathom the circumstances or childhoods that shaped the worldviews that must be necessary for either the content or timing of such crap to make sense. To me they only make me thankful that I don’t live in a country ruled by a religious right, such as Afghanistan for example. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority is our Taliban-in-waiting. A confederacy of self-righteousness prepared and willing to help us live right, even if they have to shove the correct behavior up our collective asses on a stick.
Maybe it’s not the lack of coffee causing my headache.
It seems to me that most human behavior is programmed to be fundamentally tribal, and geography, religion, politics, sexual orientation, and the like are simply attributes we use to define our groups. Tragedies such as Tuesday’s, if they bring us together, do it by expanding the boundaries of our tribe, for a time.
Both Monday’s white Catholic independent white collar resident of the Upper West Side and black Muslim Democrat municipal worker from Chicago are today’s Americans; their differences today less important in the light of recent events. As normalcy returns the scope of tribal inclusion is likely to shrink as some of these dimensions begin to matter again. But for now, we are united under a common cause.
Weirdly though, the hyper reactionary choose not to be included, even for a time. In the midst of all this, they maintain a stream of rhetoric designed to exclude the rest of us from their clique of self-righteousness, and equally, to exclude themselves from our current togetherness. They stand apart, angry at what I’m not sure, preaching a religion of division, and usurping their God’s role of judge. Tonight, I will thank their God that we are governed by a more moderate element.
