The Other September 11

  I am pleased to print this reflection by my friend Joseph Prabhu, retired  Professor of Philosophy and Religion at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) and former member of the Executive Committee of the Parliament of the World's Religions. Born and raised in India, he earned advanced degrees in Germany and is active as both a scholar and a peace activist. He has edited: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar (1996 ) and co-edited the two-volume Indian Ethics: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges (2007, 2011). He has been a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University and of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Professor there.

 He is also one of the charming and delightful peripatetic philosophers I know....we often enjoy walks together in the San Gabriels, where we talk theology and politics as we ascend to glorious vistas overlooking the Los Angeles basin all the way to Catalina Island. (When the smog isn't too dense!) For those who value the life of the mind, this is pure bliss!

September 11 was a turning point for America, for the world, and for me personally. This "day of infamy" was what drew me into the interfaith peace movement, and led to friendships with remarkable people like Joseph Prabhu. At the end of his reflection, he poses a question well worth pondering:  "Will we associate this day with violence and retaliation waged in the name of military victories, or will be rather learn from Gandhi and Vivekananda the messages of a robust peace and of harmony between peoples?  This is a truly teachable moment."  

                                                         

                               

Today is September 11^th 2017. The New York Times highlights one of its editorials as: “9/11: Finding Answers in Ashes 16 Years Later.” But what answers? And what memories? That depends both on our historical perspective and the lessons we take away from that perspective.

September 11^th, 2001, in the American imagination is a day of infamy when we were attacked by terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City and in the process killed 2,753 people. We should certainly mourn the dead and their families, just as we decry acts of terrorism and violence, now such a common and ubiquitous feature of our world. 9/11, 2001 was a deep psychic wound to our nation, which experienced a new form of violence, besides war, directed symbolically to the financial and social heart of the country. It is therefore appropriate that we mourn both the dead and the violent forces and attitudes that cause such deaths.

But what answers have we gleaned from that traumatic experience? The national response to the event at the time was to launch massive wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly with the purpose of attacking the terrorists and the countries supposedly harboring them. The idea was to show that America would not be messed with and that we would retaliate in the case of an attack and seek “victory” through arms and bombs.

It is deeply ironic, then, that the person most strongly opposed to such a response to violence, Mahatma Gandhi, on the very same date in 1906 launched his satyagraha or nonviolence movement. The Natal government in South Africa had come up with an ordinance disenfranchising Indians and essentially inflicting a form of apartheid government on them. The essence of that nonviolent movement had to do with fighting violence and injustice with the weapons of truth, soul-force, and patient suffering, with the idea not of retaliation and “victory,” but of establishing a safe space where differences could be discussed and negotiated, and peace and harmony achieved at least in the conflict at hand.

As we know from history that movement, launched on the other September 11^th, has turned out to be one of the most powerful moral-social forces in modern times. Gandhi himself used it successfully in his struggle for Indian independence from the British. And his example has been followed by leaders and movements as diverse as Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle in the US, Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, the East European struggles against Communist totalitarianism,  and Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. In Gandhi’s own words: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.”

As it turns out, there is yet another significant event on September 11. On this date in 1893, the first Parliament of the World’s Religions was opened as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the first global interfaith gathering in modern history. America up to that point saw itself as a largely Protestant-Christian country, but with the Parliament it opened itself to the diversity of the world’s religions and preached a message of peace and harmony among them as an essential step toward achieving a wider peace in the world. A brilliant Indian monk from the Ramakrishna Order, Swami Vivekananda, caught the imagination of the delegates gathered in the assembly and through them the imagination of the globe.

It is worth citing his message to the Parliament, because it is still timely and relevant: “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth…But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”

So, when we in a broader historical perspective consider some of the other significant events that have taken place on September 11^th we might revision how we see this date in history and more significantly what lessons we learn from it. Will we associate this day with violence and retaliation waged in the name of military victories, or will be rather learn from Gandhi and Vivekananda the messages of a robust peace and of harmony between peoples?  This is a truly teachable moment.