This Monday saw the twenty-second anniversary of the attacks on September 11th, 2001. I decided I’d talk about that day and the days and years that followed with my 8th grade U.S. History students as it most closely dealt with their own curriculum more than with anyone else who I’m teaching right now. I told them that to me 9/11 was the true beginning of the 21st century, rather than Millennium Night the year before. That’s because so much of this century has been defined for me by its violence, its chaos, and its terror. This compares to what I remember of the late 1990s as a time of peace, optimism, and wonder from my own childish eyes at the time. I saw the world as a little boy, not noticing most of the troubles or worries of the world, just gazing in awe and wonder at what was before me in the moment.
My early childhood wasn’t a time of blissful ignorance akin to the early moments in the story of Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, who knew no suffering in his princely palace until his curiosity led him out onto the street and into the real world for the first time. I knew bad things happened, and that there were people misled into evil. I had seen the effects of death and had an idea of what it was, but none of these essences of our reality set themselves into that visceral sensation of knowing until after that sunny Tuesday morning when the world changed all around me, and I and my classmates in our third grade room on the upper floor of St. Patrick’s School in Kansas City, Kansas were unaware of it all, the great tempest brewing around us on that cloudless day.
Over the last few weeks on my drives to and from my new day job at another parochial school on the Kansas side of the border I’ve been listening to a new audiobook of Andrew Robinson’s A Stitch in Time, a novel following the life of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s beloved Cardassian spy-turned-simple tailor Elim Garak. The audiobook is narrated by Robinson, who played Garak throughout DS9‘s original 1993-1999 run, much to the delight of fans of the show such as myself. I of course had already read A Stitch in Time, and its anthologized sequel the story “The Calling” which was published in 2003 in the delightful collection Prophecy and Change. Let me briefly digress from this week’s topic to say that as much as I loved reading and now listening to A Stitch in Time, Robinson’s “The Calling” remains for me the greatest sequel I have yet read for how beautifully it captures a sensation of peace and resolution coming to a people as maligned by their own poor decisions as the Cardassians.
Many moments stuck out to me from A Stitch in Time, yet the pinnacle of these was Garak’s realization that everyone around him, himself included, regularly wears masks to hide their true intentions and weaknesses. These masks might be physical, like an ancient theatre mask or the famed half mask worn by Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, but more often they are built in the wearer’s personality and projection to those around them. So, when I was trying to find a conclusion to my recollections about 9/11 this Monday, I thought of Garak and the masks. I told them that everyone wears them, everyone has something they highlight for all to see, and that beneath that mask of power, popularity, ferocity, clownery, or even awkwardness lies another person. That person may be self-conscious or afraid of showing their true face, or they may have just grown used to wearing that mask from a time when they were unsure how to face the world around them. Still, behind every emotion we express there lies another human being who like all of us was once born naked, exposed, powerless, and most importantly innocent of both good and evil.
To me, 9/11 was a moment of great tragedy for what we chose to do in its aftermath. The United States was quick to act in launching the largest manhunt in human history to capture and kill the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and in the process to ensure that countries like Afghanistan under the Taliban would no longer be safe havens for terrorists. The enemy soon shifted, once a role filled by the Nazis and later by the Soviets, a role that had shifted without focus for some time now began to sharpen in relief towards terrorists, but not any old terrorist, only Muslim terrorists were the true enemy. The rage of America fed a deep Islamophobia which still burns bright within this country. Yet as that rage was noticed for its power it was quickly monetized and commercialized, utilized by those wishing for quick victories against their political rivals at home at the expense of compromise and civil discourse. The longest legacy of 9/11 was a new political era in American history driven by fear and hatred of the other, whether foreign or domestic.
The masks that Bin Laden and all those who use terror and fear to achieve their aims may seem powerful in the moment yet quickly crack under pressure from demands for justification. They do not seek to ensure passage to some blissful afterlife like the death masks or sarcophagi of the Egyptian mummies, but instead seek to do the greatest amount of harm to those in the way for the short term gains of greater terror among one’s enemies and greater publicity for one’s cause. To fight these masks, we adopted our own versions of them, donned visages painted red in our own rage, and forgot what each other’s faces beneath those masks looked like.
Beneath each mask lies another person, who fears their own weaknesses and searches often in vain for their strengths within the great dark forests of our fears. It is often hard for me to focus on all the things I’ve accomplished in my thirty years amid all those memories of embarrassment and pain, and this new job working with young people just learning how to fit into their own skin has helped me tremendously to be comfortable in my own as an adult and a sometimes leader. I tried to impart my deepest held belief on all of this in my last point about this week’s somber anniversary before moving onto Monday’s lessons; that we should never celebrate the death of those who have done evil things, for as evil as that person’s choices may have been they were still just another person behind a mask. Perhaps, that mask had become their face, engrained seething onto their skin until they could not remember the face beneath, until they could not see the child they once were, the innocence they once embodied. Theirs is a mask which they could still lower, a false vision of strength they could let go of, if only they didn’t fear the warm sunlight touching their face for the first time in so very long.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 