From 2001 October 7: I Want to Speak Now

2001 October 7:

I want to speak now.

I have wanted to speak since September 11. The words would not come. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was, almost literally, unthinkable. And language is the substrate of thought. Scholars have often claimed that what you cannot say, you cannot think. I have learned, a little, that the opposite is true.

The terrorists committed crimes on so many levels, it staggers the mind: on the global and personal level; publicly and intimately; on the field of history and transcending history. One more can be added to their list of offenses: They took away our voice. For too many days we as a people lost our voice. We were silent in shock or quiet from deference. We remained still because we had lost our confidence, our unspoken faith in a world that rewarded virtue and understood human frailties. We had our universe of discourse, our common cultural dictionary, ripped from us violently and tossed upon the dustbin of history.

I want to speak now.

I want to speak to the whole world. I want to lay out my side, our side, for the judgment of the species. I want to climb to the highest mountaintop and shout out the meaning of what occured there and then, just as soon as I know what that meaning is. I want there to be meaning. I want to sing a tale of treachery and bravery, of vile cunning brandished and innocence lost. I want to console my countrymen and confound my enemies. I want to boom out, with the thunder of angels, what has been assaulted and what has survived.

I want to speak now.

In some gut-wrenching way, I want to preserve what happened. I want no patina of years to obscure the raw pain of that day. I want no carefully digested communal wisdom to replace the abrupt fear and limitless rage. Lessons must be learned and wisdom gained, or all will have been lost. I don’t know what I feel now — I might never — but I know, I know that it’s important. And I know I am not alone. In a twisted way, these acts of fanaticism and desparation have made clear unto us all: We are not alone. We are in this together.

I want to speak now.

I want to reach out to my fellow citizens of the last, best hope for humankind, this bumbling and benighted, naive and wonderful nation that has always been more imagined than real, that has never suffered its dreams to die. Our enemies call their attack justified by our alleged sins against their nation, meaning the original sense of a genetic race. I want to celebrate aloud the miracle that is my nation, that does not define itself through the accidents of genetics but through shared dedication to the cause of freedom and harmony. I want to preach to my fellow citizens that the very polyglot composition of our country is both the stimulus for terror and its ultimate refutation.

I want to speak now.

I want to thunder at the enemies of the civilized world. I want to tell them, “You might have perpetrated this, but we have your number. For so long now, you have poked and pricked and pawed at the sleeping giant, crowing nervously that tolerance equates to weakness, laughing too loudly as you struggled to convince others and yourselves.” I want to hand down the wisdom of ages, that the giant now stirs. I want to say to those responsible and those cheering, “We know who you are. And now we know what you are. And you will never sleep soundly again, for someday, soon or late, in one of your bolt-holes or another, the clenched right fist of God will come knocking on your door and your hour will be come at last. And we will not need to slaughter innocents to make our point.”

I want to speak now.

The world must seize this moment, this instant of awful clarity, and must see its way clear. It cannot do so unless everyone — every ordinary citizen, every breathing human, every soul small and great — speaks now. Too long we have let the terms of the game be set by others. We have allowed the weak and the fearful to dictate the rules. We have made them strong because we have refused to be strong ourselves. We have let them substitute their cacophony for our harmony. The world must seize this moment. We must, every one of us, speak now, and speak daily, and raise up our voices as one to demand that such things not be tolerated, not be allowed, not be possible in the future that we hand to our children.

I want to speak now.