911

It was in the mid-’70s when a global furor was heard after India tested its first nuclear bomb. India evidently aimed its technology to counter Chinese military and political posturing along its border, and to bolster its standing against its erstwhile cousins in the Indus Valley and the Bengali deltas. India went ahead with its tests in spite of the sentiments expressed the year before in the first Peace Conference in Hiroshima.

India, then considered the sick little brown man (sic) in Asia among the members of Her Royal Majesty’s Commonwealth of the British Empire, suddenly experienced a resurgence of national spirit and confidence that spurred its economy and enlivened its politics. The 99lb man in the beach flexed his muscles to join the ranks of Superman USA, which continued testing its nuclear capability after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946 in the northwest Pacific atolls of Bikini and Enewetak, followed by the Kremlin’s tests in 1953. Forty-four nations capable of producing nuclear armaments finally had to regulate their arsenal frenzy with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which today still has North Korea outside of its circle of influence.

This telling of New Delhi’s rediscovery of its self-confidence is to say that it is no different from the self-righteous indignation felt among not a few Islamic centers in Kabul and Islamabad, Tehran and Baghdad, Damascus and Riyadh after the twin towers of New York, symbol of the globalization of the world’s economy, got rammed by two hijacked planes commandeered by forces of the al-Qaeda, and gave sudden prominence to the activities of the Talibans, Hamas, Abu Zayyaf, Hezbollah and other Moslem Liberation Fronts around the world.

European children are all too familiar with the other September 11 that was heralded since 1683 as the day Europe stopped the Ottoman Empire from entering the gates of Vienna and devouring the rest of Europe. This date also marked the turn of the tide for the followers of Mohammed’s expansion to the rest of the world, culminating in the defeat of the Turks in World War I. September 11 in the minds of the followers of the Koran was a day of humiliation in the same scale as Pearl Harbor to the American mind became a day of infamy that would fuel the American spirit and spark its nascent industrial-based economy.

It is very telling of the age to which I belong that I still have a panoramic picture of the New York skyline and the World Center twin towers gracing the wall of my Social Studies class. I do not have, and probably will not care to get one if it was made available, an updated photo of the skyline where there is nothing but empty space on the spot where this symbol of global trade and commerce once stood.

It also means that if in my world view, as it is in many of my colleagues, there has been a resurgence of the human spirit symbolized by the earthrise and the moonwalk, the Luke Skywalker of our mythology, but 911.2001 and the twin towers of New York is our Darth Vader, the emergence of the sanctified bully pulpit that ironically Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush and an acquiescent America have resurrected and used to lead this nation into a quagmire of ill-conceived adventures and a defensive spirit of fear and trepidation more appropriate for the losers of a failing enterprise than the hope-filled champions of an exuberant human endeavor.

That 911 highlighted the crisis immanent in the civilizing process where Empire has been the legitimized mode of social organization, it might be instructive to notice that in the Chinese ideogram, the word for “crisis” is the paradoxical fusion of limits and possibilities. In the yin-yang of human existence is the universal essence that the ascending force of life creation is also the descending force of termination and death.

These would all be academic and just philosophical were it not too real and true in the common ground of our daily life. Even in the hallowed halls of our Legislature, we find mean streaks of character assassination and street-dirty partisanship while the flowering of openness and accountability is nipped in the bud. The practices of coercion and intimidation are commonly held in our schools where it passes for discipline and order. What would be legitimate corrective measures are turned around into forms of punishment so that even such matters as the retention of children in a grade level has proven to be 100 percent counterproductive. In the years I had been with the Public School System, I have yet to see a grade level retained child behave to improve his/her academic performance. Instead, the attitude of defiance and rebellion multiplies geometric-fold.

911 has caused us to build walls when we actually want to build bridges. While we might think the physical walls in the Mexican border and the mental ones we’ve instituted in the Canadian divide is distant from us in the Commonwealth, our labor pains stems from a calcifying “Us and Them” dichotomy that has suddenly emerged in sharpened definition of ideological differences, and a sudden emergence of ethnic divisiveness out of the archaic notion that there is not enough to go around so we must take care of our immediate kin first before we allow the aliens, foreigners and strangers to the common table.

It does not matter that we are talking about people who have fluffed our pillows and tended our gardens, took our children to school and prepared our meals, guarded our gates and tallied our accounts, managed our business affairs and repaired our equipment, constructed our homes and paved our roads. We’ve even mixed fluids with their sons and daughters, and among their offsprings run a plethora of our genes.

Alas, even in the path of simple ascension of a Commissioner of Education not only in our Commonwealth but even among our cousins in the south, the steps are littered with acrimony and dissension that the spice of civility is getting lost in the ambience of bitterness and the taste of disagreeable acidity.

The rhetoric of the culture of inclusion is pervasive in our academic literature but our political policies and cultural practices reveal otherwise. We have become masters in the art of exclusion. Even our drive for inclusion in our Special Education, unfortunately, appears to be driven more by funding compliance than by some enlightened form of human compassion and cognition of human right.

The great wall of humiliation for a significant segment of the world’s population in the memory of 9/11 outside the gates of Vienna in 1683, and the great wall of separation we have built since 9/11 in 2001 not only “in the cobwebs of our global imagination,” but also in the laws and regulations we have since enacted, remain a formidable contradiction in the human journey.

We are indeed living in Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities in that these are the worst of times, these are the best of times. The preponderance of the therapy of despair has overcome the siren song of hope. Dare we celebrate the eucharistic (small letter) presence of our authentic lives so that our commercial ventures are not just meant to benefit the few but toward equity for the many, that we do not fear our union organizing because it is simply taking ownership of labors’ role and contribution to the whole management scheme, that we protest the absence of adequate social and economic services not to embarrass and disrespect our public officials but because we are guided by the democratic desire at participation rather than just be another instrument of partisan politics?

911 is the emergency number. Might we responsibly heed its call?