"Reverie of a Blue
Boy"
RL Johnson
Tammie
Byram Fowles,
MSW, Ph.D.
Revisiting September 11th
and Revising Our Stoies
(from July, 2002)
This month
as we celebrate yet another anniversary of the birth of America as a free
and independent nation, I'd like to take just a few moments to introduce
you to another kind of birth, a BirthQuake.
A BirthQuake is a transformational process that's triggered by significant
challenges in our lives, or what I call quakes. It's a right of passage
that much like childbirth involves both the pain of labor and the magic
of delivery, and links beginnings with endings, as all births invariably
do.
Beginning with the first tremors of the quake, it ushers in an uncertain
and often perilous time, a time "when everything is rocked and shifted,
when our foundations crack, and treasures lie buried beneath the rubble."
On September 11th, 2001, we confronted a collective quake, one that
shook the very foundation of our nation. It brought our mighty towers
down, and left our brothers and sisters entombed beneath the ruins. While
the debris is cleared away now, some of us are still haunted by the images
of crashing planes, erupting flames, the faces of terror, smoke and ashes...
On September 11th, time came as close to standing still as possible
in a country where "hurry up," and "get moving" are
just about as common as any term of endearment I can think of. On that
autumn day, the wheels of our great machine came to a grinding halt, and
in the spaces between then and now many of us we have begun to look at
ourselves and at our country more closely.
The world changed on September 11th. And so did many of us as well.
The pain, the suffering, and the terror that has plagued so much of the
world has become much harder to ignore. My ongoing quest to be a good
mother, wife, therapist, daughter, friend, and American becomes overshadowed
now from time to time by unsettling questions.
What are my responsibilities as a world citizen? How would I need
to live my life differently if I committed to living up to these responsibilities?
What would I need to give up? Is it possible to be a worthy child of God
if I turn away from the suffering of God's other children? How should
I respond to the terrible fact that the number of war deaths in the world
are increasing at astounding rates? What is my responsibility to the estimated
40,000 children who die every single day from starvation and poverty,
when I am a citizen of a country that makes up roughly only 5 % of the
world's population but consumes more than 30% of its total resources;
a country that recently declared obesity as a national epidemic? And
how will I manage to effectively silence my clamoring voice of conscience
if I choose not to make changes in response to those answers that I'm
not even sure I want to know?
The world that I live in is the same troubled but equally beautiful
world that it was on September 10th, 2001, but today I see myself, and
it, differently. Strangely, even my sense of the past has somehow been
altered. There are many images from the world trade center attack that
are still vivid in my memory. One is a picture of a terrified dark haired
little boy in a striped shirt running away from the flaming towers, screaming.
The first time I saw that picture, another far older and more famous image
came vividly back into focus for me, that of a frail and tiny Vietnamese
girl running in terror from Napalm.
Today those two children, both worlds and decades apart, will be forever
juxtaposed in my memory, a brutal reminder that the location of the ground
where desperate children flee, or dead babies lie, is completely irrelevant.
Their agony is unspeakably tragic no matter where it exists. Only now,
for the first time in our privileged lives; our generation of Americans
saw the horrible mask of war on the faces of our own children.
Today, while I am beginning to hold my country more accountable, I
have also come to love it more fiercely. It may very well be true that
we are a nation in crisis, housed on a planet in peril, yet it was in
the very midst of conflict and danger that a triumphant people of the
newly formed United States declared to the world that, "out of the
unity from many, a new order of the ages is born."
Less than a week after September 11th Katherine Amsden and I sat in
her office, aching to do something, anything to ease the overwhelming
grief that had not only invaded our own hearts, but had us completely
surrounded. As we watched courageous and exhausted rescue workers pushed
far beyond their physical and emotional limits, repeatedly risking their
own lives, the word heroism took on a far deeper meaning.
We were proud of these heroes, we were profoundly grateful, and at
the same time, our hearts were breaking not only for the lost and dead,
but for those living who would not abandon them. Experts of trauma advise
that the best line of defense against trauma is to take action, to do
something. And so we did. We wrote a song, the first song that either
of us had ever written. We wrote it for the firefighters, the police officers,
and the emergency medical personnel whom we would never see in quite the
same way again. They represented the very best of us, and they had the
courage to confront the very worst.
I'm hoping that during this process of recovery and rebuilding we'll
follow their example. That we too will have the courage to not only face
what at times may seem unbearable, but to work with the same amazing commitment
to change what needs changing. Harold Goddard wrote that, "the destiny
of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than
by the stories that it loves and believes in." I am hoping that the
stories that we the people of the world ultimately embrace are more tolerant,
wiser stories that include life, liberty and justice for all people, everywhere,
and that together we might begin to love and live this old story into
a new beginning - a BirthQuake. During the month of July as we continue
to honor our heroes, perhaps we can also envision the heroic that exists
within each and every one of us...
Tammie
Byram Fowles
"Virginia's
JourneyThrough Death and Life..."
