I awoke on the morning of September 11, 2001, to a radio news report that the World Trade towers were down. Not knowing what else to do, I continued with my usual routine. I took my clothes to the laundromat across the street, where a big-screen TV showed pictures of what looked like a dust storm on the moon.
Later that morning I called San Francisco State University to confirm that the job interview I had scheduled for that afternoon was still happening. At first, the assistant said yes. Then she put me on hold, and came back a few minutes later to say that the interview had been cancelled.
Then the phone lines went dead and remained so for the rest of the day.
National Public Radio News went into nearly twenty-four-hour coverage, assigning all of its reporters and editors worldwide to the same story.
All four of the planes that were hijacked that day were bound for California, and many of the passengers had deep connections to our state. A few days after the attacks there was an outdoor memorial on the UC Berkeley campus. The turnout was good and the mood was solemn, respectful, and almost eerily quiet.
Toward the end of the remembrance, I noticed that to one side of the stage, a student was holding a banner with a peace sign on it. That was the only politicking, if you can call it that, I saw that afternoon. It was a day for somber reflection, not one for flaunting one's political point of view.
Or so I had thought. A few weeks later the California alumni magazine ran a cover photo of the event with a large American flag — which I hadn't seen — in the foreground and a mass of students in the background. Due to the clever camera angle, the photo made it look like the students were rallying around the flag that afternoon. They were doing no such thing.
We've been told over the years that the 9/11 attacks had something to do with religion or politics. Not so. To the contrary, they had everything to do with extremism, an ideology that bears little relation beyond the superficial either with any of the world's great religions or with any orthodox, mainstream political philosophy. It strains credulity and the definitions of words to assert that the mass murder of civilians is a religious or political philosophy.
Extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, while they may live in and interact, however awkwardly, with the outside world, are not of the world that you and I know as we go about our lives in the liberal democratic West.
Another important point to remember is that one of the most pernicious aspects of extremism is its ability to mobilize latent extremist tendencies in those under attack, thus creating a vicious cycle of extremism that threatens to kill us all.
In any case, all nineteen of the 9/11 bombers are dead. Fifteen of them, including one of the pilots, were from Saudi Arabia, a nation we were told and are still told is our ally and friend.
According to the 9/11 Report, although we now know that Al-Qaeda formed in the late 1980s, it did not appear in publicly available national security documents until 1998, just three years before the attack.
The press was too busy covering Monica Lewinsky and OJ Simpson to keep the public informed about what was going on internationally. Most major news organizations had substantially reduced their overseas staffing after realizing that the public preferred a steady diet of celebrity scandal and gossip.
We were now in the information age, the age of 24-hour entertainment. History as we had understood it — the complex interplay of competing and ever-shifting international alliances and national interests — had ended, we were told, in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
They even called it the End of History.
History rose from the grave on 9/11 as the US suffered its worst security failure since Pearl Harbor, and its worst failure within its borders since the War of 1812. Yet, no one, to my knowledge, lost their job, not even the person at the Al-Qaeda desk, if indeed there was such a position, at the CIA. No one was prosecuted for criminal negligence or non-performance of duty in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.
To the contrary, three years later the public rewarded Bush, our first president since Reconstruction to receive less than a plurality of the popular vote, with an outright majority of the vote as well as his second electoral victory.
The attack came at a time when our democracy was at a low ebb and anti-democratic forces within the republic were on the ascendency.
When empires crumble, it's usually from within. An outside attack is usually little more than a coup de grâce.
The cockpit doors could have been secured on all commercial aircraft, but proposals before Congress to require such a change went down to predictable defeats. The airlines feared adding a few dollars to the price of a ticket.
The supersonic fighter jets that were scrambled out of Rome, NY, and Long Island on 9/11 were more than capable of shooting down the subsonic hijacked planes. It would have been messy, as they were flying over a densely populated area, but almost certainly not as deadly as what ultimately happened in lower Manhattan.
The picture that emerges is one of a government unable or unwilling to put public safety first, even in a building complex that had been bombed by Islamic terrorists just eight years before. In the meantime, the City had moved its emergency command center into the WTC complex, greatly degrading its ability to respond effectively and save lives on 9/11.
We now know that skyscrapers built in clusters will fail together when one of them fails. Every child who plays with blocks knows this.
Our failure was one of imagination, our inability to prepare for an attack that cost the hijackers as little as a few hundred thousands of dollars, and that exploited and appropriated our own training schools, airplanes, and jet fuel. The four hundred billion dollars a year we were spending at the time on defense proved to be woefully insufficient. I wonder where the money went.
If the Titanic may be said to be the symbolic high point of the British Empire, the moment at which the arrogance of power reached the tragic limit of its absurdity, then 9/11 is the high point of the worldwide American Empire.
The US response was to invade Afghanistan, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and Iraq, where the number of fatalities surpassed one hundred thousand within a few short years. More than a decade later, we still have troops in these countries.
Sadly, it appears that in the United States, the financial and cultural incentives are to humanize our own people and all but ignore everyone else. The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles profiling the domestic victims of 9/11, with stories about their childhoods, recitations of their personal likes and dislikes, and remembrances from friends and family. To my knowledge, the Times has never printed the names of individual Afghan or Iraqi civilians killed in the subsequent American War on Terror.
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I visited the World Trade Center once. It was in the summer of 1979, when the Twin Towers were in their first years of occupancy and the other buildings in the Trade Center complex, which were also destroyed on 9/11, had yet to be built. I was there to attend a hearing at the offices of the New York State Legislature. The subject that day was, ironically, child abuse in cults. The groups that had come under scrutiny were known for the rigidity and one-dimensionality of their messaging and for their deeply hateful, and in some cases violent, worldviews.
Equally notable for its absence was the lack of a different kind of programming — the positive message of universal love and the oneness of humanity that saints and mystics worldwide, as well as the founders of our great religions, have lived and taught since time immemorial.
Chris Edwards, a former member of the Unification Church and the author of Crazy for God: The Nightmare of Cult Life, testified. He said that he had graduated with a perfect average from Yale University before joining the Church, but discovered upon leaving it that he was unable to read. I heard that after receiving numerous death threats from the cult, he refused to testify until the committee agreed to provide him with security.
The room was packed with Moonies along with a few Hare Krishnas wearing temple robes.
A representative from the New York Civil Liberties Union warned the lawmakers that any attempt to restrict religious activities would be unconstitutional.
It was clear from the proceedings that day that most in government misunderstood, and that some were even openly hostile toward, our attempts to raise public awareness on the issue of destructive cults. Some even had the audacity to invoke religious freedom as an excuse for their inaction. I wonder where the "religious freedom" people are today, now that the idea of police surveillance or even outright bans on certain religious groups has become popular in certain quarters.
What those of us who are former members of destructive cults, and who have worked in the anti-cult field, can offer is an understanding of the dynamics of the induction and de-induction processes.
The good news is that almost any adult who can be persuaded to pause their contact with the cult can be successfully de-inducted. The process centers around the restoration of access to information originating from outside the group.
The bad news is that de-induction is labor and resource intensive and requires considerable expertise and experience. It often takes many to save one. But saving one life is worth the effort. Just ask any family that has been affected by a destructive cult.