By Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
One of the most serious problems we face in working out how to deal with thedangers of terrorism is a deep split in our awareness of ourselves.
On one side of that split is "America the Beautiful," our awareness ofourselves as a decent, caring society.
On the other side of that split is "Ameruica the Obscene Machine" — others'awareness of us as a destructive center of arrogant power.
The notion that in some ways BOTH these pictures could be true is rarelyheldby anyone.
What does it mean to assert that "America is beautiful"? — From insideAmerican society, most of us experience it as quite good. Free speech &religion, astounding material prosperity, a free-and-easy atmosphere thatmost of us enjoy.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks (9-1-1, David Waskow points out to me), insome ways we are even a better country than usual: We took self-sacrificeandsolidarity as real, and acted to make them happen.
Some of us who feel this way in our own ongoing lives are uneasily and maybedimly conscious that some Americans may not FULLY experience it this way:many African-Americans, many Native Americans, maybe Hispanic Americans,right now Muslims and Arabs, people of truly unconventional religions, somewomen, some gay people, the poor in chronic-economic-disaster areas, thoseemotionally and spiritually connected to shattered earth-air-water. (Addsup,hmmmm?)
But on balance, what most of us see and live every day is that this is areally GOOD place to live.
It Is. This Is A Truth. Those Of Us On "The Left" Need To Ingest, Digest,That It Is A Truth.
What VERY few of us Americans really grok is how we come across to much ofthe human race from OUTSIDE the circle of this society.
For millions, we are NOT a "good country." They don't hate "ordinaryAmericans" — most of them had real horror and empathy at seeing screaming,burning people leap from the Twin Towers — but they also remember:
The USA killed about a million Vietnamese. Sponsored terrorists in Nicaragua that killed about 30,000 and shattered anexperiment in socialist democracy. Sponsored a coup in Chile that overthrew a democratically elected govt,killed 30,000 or so Chileans and tortured many others. Pays for the Apache helicopters that shoot into Palestinian cities. Smashed democracy in the Dominican Republic. Paid (thru the World Bank/IMF) for economic plans that privatized watersupplies for desperately poor people who then had to pay for water —WATER!!— so they died of disease from foul water. Let our drug companies charge so much for anti-AIDS drugs that millions die.
And on and on and on. (I'm not saying there no complexities in any of thesecases. But complexities pale in the face of suffering — as we are seeingright now inside America itself.)
This is not just "remembering" in the cerebral cortex. It is in the guts —family dead, tortured, starving, exiled (sometimes becoming refugees toAmerica, and liking what they find there — INside the society).
So there are millions who hate us. US — the GOOD America, the us whoexperience ourselves as "America the Beautiful."
Most of them really do not hate us one by one or two by two. But they dohatethe collective institution, what for them is an obscene machine of Americanwealth and power.
Just As Most Americans Are Correct About This Being A Good Country, So Mostof These Millions Are Also Correct When They See The Machine-united Statesas Immensely Destructive.
Very few of them — but a few — turn this rage into mass murder.Understanding that does not justify the mass murders. From any decent valuesystem, the anger at the obscene machine would also prohibit acting in suchvile ways to human beings. And the terrorists ought to be arrested, tried,punished.
But we Americans don't restrict our anger to the few who actually becometerrorists. Since for most us the hatred of millions for the ObsceneMachineruns totally contrary to our own life-experience about our own days andnights in America, we define it as demonic. Evil. How could they hate us —we who are decent people in a decent society — unless they were evil?
THAT IS THE DISCONNECT THAT WE NEED TO ADDRESS.
We need to be able to affirm bOTH truths. Not only because it's politicallycrucial to get it, but because in some weird sense they are both true.
America the beautiful society — and America the obscene machine.
How do we teach both truths?
Shalom, Arthur
Rabbi Arthur WaskowDirector, The Shalom Center<www.shalomctr.org> <www.FreeOurTime.org>—