What have we made of Sept. 11, 2001 attacks?

MICHELE MARR

As the second anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 approaches, I find myself

thinking back to the day the terrorist attacks occurred. Like a car

wreck, or any other blind-siding catastrophe, the images of those

attacks seem branded in my memory. I remember how I felt: helpless,

grieving and shocked.

I remember the flood of condolences from friends and colleagues

around the world. An e-mail message from a friend in New Zealand

said, “We are thinking of you and are devastated at the news that we

have woken to this morning.” In those words or others, that’s what so

many people said.

The immediate reaction was horror mixed with solidarity and

sympathy. Many offered and asked for prayers.

Now, looking back over what I wrote that week, one paragraph in

particular stands out for me; it waits for the other shoe to drop.

“How long will it be before the rest starts? The anger. The rage.

Blame. Retaliation. Revenge. There was a time, before I believed in

the grace of God, when tragedy could take me to a place so dark I

could hardly breathe, a place so dark I didn’t know if I wanted to

breath. In that place, anger and rage were the only things that

promised to free me.”

Scripture begs us not to take that route.

Jesus urged, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do

good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you

and persecute you.” (Matt. 5:44) And St. Paul taught, “Never take

revenge, for the scriptures say, ‘I [the Lord] will pay back.’...Do

not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans

12:19-21)

But it can be so hard to do things God’s way, hard to imagine how,

when our loss calls for remittance.

Over the past two years, my question has been answered. The answer

came far sooner than I’d hoped. We have been to war twice. Many of us

have been polarized between peace-mongers and patriots, Americans and

foreign born. We’ve added anger to anger, hatred to hatred and shed

blood on blood.

A few weeks ago I finally saw the movie “Gangs of New York.” I had

put off seeing it because I don’t handle viewing brutality and gore

well. It usually drives me to the soda and gum-sticky refuge of the

theater floor. But at home, with the reassurance of the skip button

of a DVD, I took the risk.

Not a few critics panned Scorcese’s film for being flawed and even

tedious. Film critic Joshua Tyler called it “an unapologetic mess,

whose only saving grace is that it ends by blowing just about

everything up.”

I was transfixed. In spite of the violence, or maybe partly

because of it, watching “Gangs of New York” was like viewing the

present through a lens of the past, which I think may be why Scorcese

-- who had wanted to make this movie for 30 years -- was himself so

fascinated with Herbert Asbury’s book on which the movie is based.

The story is set in mid-19th century New York, Manhattan’s Lower

East Side, in a neighborhood known as Five Points, during the Civil

War. Hollywood describes it as “the story of a young man seeking

revenge against the powerful gang leader who killed his father,” and

that it is, but it’s so much more.

It’s a tangle of stories, told from the vantage of hindsight.

There are noble ambitions (Boss Tweed’s vision of a city with decent

infrastructure and municipal services) born of self-serving

motivations and wrought by vile means (Gang boss Bill the Butcher’s

brutal oppression of a neighborhood mired in the worst poverty).

There are urban turf wars (nativist, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants

against newly-immigrated Irish Catholics) overshadowed by the Civil

War. There is the story of the first U.S. draft, which allowed those

who could to buy their exemption with a payment of $300. For the poor

in Five Points, it may as well have been $300 million.

There is, too, the story of the New York draft riots, which rose

up at this injustice to be suppressed days later by the Federal Army

but not before it took an estimated 100 lives, several of them

lynchings of newly-freed slaves.

The movie’s end is poignant. Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays

Amsterdam Vallon, the young man who sought revenge against Bill the

Butcher, who killed his father, stands in a graveyard across from the

smoky rubble that just days ago was Five Points -- what will, in

time, become the New York skyline.

“Friend or foe,” he says, “it didn’t make no difference now. It

was four days and nights until the worst of the mob was finally put

down.... My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation.

And so, then too, was our great city. But for those of us what lived

and died in them furious days it was like everything we knew was

mightily swept away. And, no matter what they did to build this city

up again, for the rest of time it would be like no one even knew we

was ever here.”

As he speaks, the New York skyline changes behind him until he

stands against a skyline that includes the World Trade Center twin

towers.

Sometime during this summer I read a story about actress and

artist Rose Portillo. When asked about mosaics she had created, she

said, “You go through the rubble and pick through it and make

something out of it.”

Today, as I consider the events of Sept. 11, 2001, I wonder what it is that we are making out of it.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].