noise to signal

My memory of 9/11/2001

I was sitting right here, in my bathrobe, reading e-mail. The phone rang. Debra said "I knew you'd be awake and I had to call someone." I hadn't seen the news, but a quick scan of the news services chilled and confused me. We chatted for a few minutes, then she hung up.

I watched the news progress, and decided that the best thing for me would be to act as normally as possible. I went to work, but spent most of the day watching the live feed on MSNBC.

The next day, I wrote a letter to the editor, and sent it to several newspapers. The Seattle P-I published it on the 14th:

The events in New York and Washington, D.C., are a terrible tragedy for our country. My heart is with the families and friends of all those who were affected.

The deaths and injuries people sustained are all the more tragic because the blame for their deaths should be laid on the decades of U.S. foreign policy that created an environment where an attack of this magnitude could be mounted.

The United States has spent years going into South and Central America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, destabilizing governments, supporting thuggish dictators and playing games. When people didn't quite have the skills needed to spread terror most effectively, we brought them to Fort Benning, Ga., to train at the School of the Americas.

For years, our arrogance allowed us to believe that the chaos and fear we created would stay inside the countries we wanted to affect. Tuesday, that arrogance was proven tragically hollow.

We may eventually track down the people who directed this individual attack.

But the blood of the victims is on our own hands.

In the weeks after it was published, several people I knew well or casually came up to me and thanked me for my letter. "I thought I was the only person who felt that way" was a common comment.

Miz Becky and I headed out on a previously-planned trip around northeastern Oregon the day the letter was published. A few days later, in Halfway, I checked our answering machine at home to see if there were any messages. There were two: one from someone I had never met, thanking me for my letter, and another one that was less positive:

"Your, uh, letter indicates that you are a pacifist anti-american motherfucker, and as an old Navy SEAL, I can guarantee you I know where you live, and you're a fucking dead man."

You can hear my first death threat for yourself, if you like.

Now, at this point it's obvious that it was nothing more than a crank call designed to scare me. And it did — I've never been quite as comfortable sending a letter to the editor since.

But even more disturbing is how clearly it defined the deep divide that was going to split the USA over the next few years — how blindingly angry people on both ends of the political spectrum have become. If someone had told me at that moment that we were going to unilaterally engage in a New Vietnam in Iraq 18 months later, I wouldn't have been surprised.

What's saddest to me, on this anniversary, is that for one brief beautiful moment, we had the sympathies of the rest of the world. Vigils were held all over the world. We had a chance to join with the rest of the world, and to start working on real solutions to the anti-american hatred we had been stirring up for years.

Sadly, we went in the opposite direction. Instead of containing anti-american sentiment, it's spread. Instead of reducing the power of the hateful minority of radical Muslims, we've helped their recruiting programs. Instead of joining together as a country to move forward, we've become more deeply divided than ever before.

Shame on us for dishonoring the memory of the people who died in the terrorist attacks two years ago.