Under the White Flag of Faith by Daniel Bush '99
		For a short time, after September 11, everything that had been taken for granted before was no longer being taken for granted. Every parting was of poignant significance, because it was another relationship that might have been lost. Every embrace contained the pained strength of gratefulness. We did not know what would happen next. We did not know what was happening now. The phones rang with faraway voices wanting to know if we were alright. In every conversation the missing were present. The missing we knew others were still waiting for, those that they would go on waiting for, and those that would never come home. Difficult deaths. No one should assign meaning to the deaths of those killed in terror. The most we can do is respect their rights as dead people, to let them have their own deaths, their uncompleted meanings, now silenced. If we could adequately remember how they died, the terror and chaos, dust, rock and fire, that consumed them, we would never want to cause others terror. The agony would be too present. The bombs that now fall from the sky on the heads of people far away would seem too awful a price to pay for our own safety. The deathly cost of our freedom too clear. Explosions, collapsing buildings. I remember the knowledge slowly solidifying in me after the whispered news of the towers collapsing--my father could be in there. That he walks through the towers every morning on his way to work. But he should have passed through much earlier. My mind cracked with the math of minutes, calculations. Running across the street to the phone, my insides melted,and I felt flashes of horror and the need to hear his voice. I dialed the phone and waited, then heard his voice and the breath behind his voice and felt the release of oxygen into my lungs. Tears. But now, must others wait in the not knowing space of that awful urgency? Bombs, violence, justice, rubble. Can there be a moral reckoning with what has brought us to this terrible place? The media sounds the drumbeat for death. The flag is pasted up like wallpaper around the country. And people seek healing in patriotic songs sung in some strange act of cleansing confidence. Songs that forget those who live here in terror, those who are Black or Muslim, those whose votes and lives are not counted enough. Songs that erase Native peoples whose land was stolen to erect our towering sense of freedom. America is a strange mythical land of dispossession. We can turn too readily from our deep weeping ache towards words too round with patriotism from a President who took his office because legally he could, even when everyone knew he did not win the election. We're stuck with a leader inherited from a decade over-devoted to amassing property and lethargy. More flags for freedom. Might terror come of too much safety, in a country that believes too easily that G-d is on our side and wants the deaths of others? We can refuse to see ourselves as a people vulnerable like other people, and yet those who wish us hatred will refuse to see their family’s faces in our faces. To go back to the way things were when we cannot go back to the way things were is awful failure. We may flood churches and synagogues and sacred spaces while we are scared and uncertain, but to find what? To worship what kind of G-d? Janet Walton observed that the central symbol we need to find in the center of our sacred space is a pile of rubble. A pile of rubble. G-d is untimely. As some of us marched in the first peace rally officially noted in the New York Times on October 7, rotund white men on the sidelines shouted angry curses on us and said we were in the wrong country. I wanted to whisper to them that we were what freedom looks like. One evening at Union Square, above the candles of memory, I saw that someone had draped the statue of George Washington in a white flag of truce. In his high up place, he looked imposing and sad, oddly like some kind of majestic message carrier for some different kind of revolution. He was alone up there and made me feel mournfully that we are being called to repair what G-d cannot repair.
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