|
 |
||
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||
|
University News Contact: Gerry Everding - (314) 935-6375 gerry_everding@aismail.wustl.edu Wayne Fields calls for healing at campus vigil, Sept. 11 Wayne Fields, Ph.D., is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor in English and co-director of the American Culture Studies Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He provided the following remarks at a campus vigil marking the anniversary of Sept. 11. Transcript of Wayne Fields' comments [St. Louis, MO., 9-13-02] By Wayne Fields Once more, on this anniversary of sorrow and loss, it is apparent--despite what we have so often been told, and have so often told ourselves--"time does not heal all wounds." Though a year has passed, the anguish of victim families has not been lessened, nor has any true sense of national resolution been achieved. We may have, in these twelve months grown accustomed to increased security checks and frequent travel delays, may have over these months stopped paying more than casual attention to rumors of new attacks, and gotten back to what to all appearances is business as usual. But to heal is not the same as merely to endure. It is a gift more profound and more costly. In truth time heals no wounds. Only growth allows healing. Only by becoming ourselves changed, different than we were before, do we get better, are we healed. This is why, in another moment of national agony in another hour of violence and destruction that a few weeks following his remarks would claim him as well, Robert Kennedy spoke these words only minutes after being informed of Martin Luther King's assassination. "In this difficult day," he told an audience, stunned by the announcement he had just made, "in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and [in] what direction we want to move." Then he quoted Aeschylus, the ancient poet who devoted so much of his art to the consideration of human suffering, and these words of terrible hope. "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." In this hour in which we remember terrible suffering and loss, perhaps it would be best merely to stand silent, humbled by the sacrifice of others, to avoid the presumption of inadequate words, and simply recall the eloquence of men and women who, in their final moments on this earth, remembered others, refused to abandon wounded colleagues, comforted strangers, reached out to console the rest of us even while they themselves stood in the inferno. We who, with the luxury of time, look back now must be moved to more than tears, to a rededication of our lives to the great witness they made at the end of theirs. In circumstances for which none of us can be prepared, people who only moments before had occupied little islands defined by race and class and rank, people--like ourselves--who in their everyday lives for all their previous life had rarely crossed the shallow waters that separated them one from another, had lived apart in communities of the like minded, people who have--like ourselves--assumed those small channels of separation to be impassable gulfs, in an instant became the very community they--like us--had rarely dared even to imagine. Wealthy and poor, public servants and mas ters of finance, people of all colors and creeds saw their distinctions fall into insignificance and joined in a common cause and a shared humanity. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists blessed one another by their presence and the support and consolation they provided in what was all too often their last precious moments. They do not need us to speak for them. They have spoken for themselves. Rather it is time for us to speak for ourselves. When Abraham Lincoln surveyed the fields of Gettysburg, that vast battleground being dedicated as a cemetery, he addressed the living, called for their rededication to the unfinished work of those who had fallen and for a resolve that the dead should not have died in vain. So, too, do we have unfinished work. Not merely the bringing to justice of those who perpetrated the terrible crimes of last September, important as that task remains, but work even more daunting, work which the dead have both begun and given into our hands; that of reconsidering our relationship to one another and of reassessing the ways in which we measure our lives and our success. A year ago, shocked and distraught by the horror of what we had seen but could not yet believe, we declared ourselves transformed. Time and again we were told--and told one another--that we, individually and as a people, would never be the same. Perhaps we only meant by such proclamations that we would never again feel so secure in our homes or travel from place to place with the easy confidence that had become our way. But in our manner and our vague words something more seemed implied, as though we were ready to ask the question Robert Kennedy raised in 1968 and to which Lincoln had spoken in 1863: what kind of people do we want to be? Moved by stories that came out of the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and flight #93, we seemed prepared to reconsider our own assumptions, re-examine our values and aspirations. The testimony that spoke from the ashes of September 11 was not the fanatic ramblings of the murderers but the affirmations we found in the final acts of the murdered. It reminded us that, after all, it is other human beings that make life meaningful, that it is service not mastery that is ennobling, that it is in the spiritual rather than the material that we are fulfilled. Moved, amidst so much destruction, by what the victims had redeemed out of tragedy, we the living promised something better of ourselves and our society. But promises made under duress are often difficult to keep and in the past twelve months we have seen how limited is our resolve, how uncertain even the object of that resolution. In time we have slipped back into our old ways, reverted to the very practices that had, last September, seemed so inadequate. We have endured too many revelations of the betrayal by corporate leaders of those who had entrusted them with their livelihoods. And, too often, the rest of us, in our recurring insecurity have placed our faith in the ability to store up more and more for ourselves even when it means accepting less and less for those who already have too little. But the pledge we made as we learned how much the dead of 9/11 had given to one another, was to be more generous, to enlarge our notions of community and neighborhood, to expand our sense of responsibility. And at first we did give, gave in the ways we best understand, gave money, time, blood, gave in extraordinary expressions of our support for those who had paid so dearly. In time, of course, the giving slowed, we became preoccupied with our own needs, our personal sense of vulnerability, but mostly, I suspect, we did not know what beyond occasional acts of charity we should do, did not know, to repeat Robert Kennedy's question what it was we wanted to become. Ours is a time when public commentators and religious entrepreneurs grow fat on the appeal of easy answers and ch eap grace. But growth that is healing is both difficult and dear. It begins, as all our religions tell us, with a contrite heart, with the humility that profound change requires and is sustained only through the frightening work of self examination and the opening of minds as well as hearts to the ideas and aspirations of others. Those who claim that a closed mind is a requirement for righteousness mock the creative work of the very God they claim to serve. And those who declare that the troubles of the rest of the world do not concern Americans, unless they threaten an 'us' defined by national boundaries, assert a logic by which other people, closer to home, may be abandoned whenever there is an advantage in further shrinking the privileged 'we.' This is not an occasion for answers. It is rather an opportunity for reflection and a beginning, perhaps, of a more considered commitment to the changes we so quickly promised a year ago. The pain, describ ed by Aeschylus, falling drop by drop on the suffering heart, serves us by wearing away the vanities and illusions that preoccupy most of our lives most of the time, and can give us the courage to confront harder truths about ourselves and the unexamined ends we tend to pursue. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that suffering leads inevitably to wisdom. More often it takes us no farther than bitterness and despair. But it is our obligation to try for more, to hope for the grace Aeschylus described, and, if not for wisdom, at least to becoming wiser. This willingness to grow--and the humility it requires--is important for each of us individually but just as urgent for America as a nation. After every great crises this country, at its best, has labored to expand the application of principles we hold most dear, have struggled to rededicate ourselves to ideals we regard as sacred. This is a time, inspired by the good works of so many under such desperate circumstances, for idealism rather than cynicism. Surely we know in our hearts, if not our habits, that lives lived in the pursuit of wealth and personal advantage are truly impoverished. Surely we have seen that our individual security is inseparable from that of our neighbor, even neighbors who live far from what we have previously considered our neighborhood. In our effort to become whole as a nation we must, in our unparalleled position in the world, seek new ways to act on that wisdom, old as our religious texts, that to want less for others than for ourselves is foolish as well as hypocritical. Neither as individuals nor as a nation can we isolate ourselves from the suffering that falls on someone else's home in someone else's country. What we ignore diminishes us and, in time, will find us out. That which was observed so long ago of individuals is just as true today and of nations as well as persons—where is the profit in gaining the world if the soul is lost? A year has passed, and our lives have gone on. We have made changes in response to our fears. Now it is time to be changed more profoundly and positively, changed by the witness of those who one year ago spoke so eloquently in their final acts of courage and compassion, and like them to enlarge our sense of community, deepening as well as expanding our commitment to one another, dedicating ourselves to an enduring spiritual and moral growth rather than mere increase in those material goods which can pass away in the blink of an eye. We owe it to those whose lives were ended to learn from the many spontaneous acts of sacrifice that marked their passing, not to turn away from this anguish but to seek wisdom in it, to have the willingness to be transformed, and--by the grace of God--to be not only ourselves healed, but to become a healing presence in this suffering world. |
|
News & Information Home | Office of Public Affairs | WUSTL Home
Please contact us and let us know how we can assist you. Technical problems with this Web site? Please contact news_bugs@aismail.wustl.edu. Please review the WUSTL News & Information copyright/privacy policy.
|