9/11 publishing…

Shema: September 12, 2001, by Aurora Levins Morales

Hear this: while the generals, panting, peruse their lists of countries to bomb

in the sacred cause of reestablishing that their collective dick is bigger

than that of any pissant, terrorist-wielding, dark-faced dictator in a tent;

while the same men who have plotted invasion after invasion of sovereign lands

bombed cities into rubble on every inhabited continent, called the deaths of children

an acceptable sacrifice, kidnapped killed and replaced the leaders of other countries

with nothing but admiration for their own maneuvers,

Hear this! While these men diagram the next war into which they will drag us

using our fear as gasoline, using our grief as lubricant—

wake up!

America the dutiful, wake up from the mall-driven dream of snug security,

the fraudulent, flag-wrapped lifetime warranty of the good life

just out of reach but surely coming to us all, even the ragged homeless in our streets,

American ragged, in American streets, surely more pure in poverty,

more blessed than the beggars of Bangkok or Bombay.

Wake up and see the shocked eyes of a hundred thousand dead Iraqi children

watch as the fiery birds of war come home to roost.

Hear, oh people. The warriors are many.

War is one.

There is nothing to separate this fiery falling of buildings

from the buildings that have fallen in flame

under the weight of ordnance made in factories just down the road from each of us;

the jets filled with ordinary people turned into unwilling missiles were forged,

rolled, cut, riveted, welded in the same factories,

by the same billionaire wing-makers

whose jets burned the sky over Baghdad, Panama City, Grenada, the Mekong.

What should surprise us? That other residents of soot-choked cities,

other heart-ripped mourners of civilian dead, other anguished, enraged people

should be swept up in a whirlwind of revenge? What have they done to us

that so many hateful, hysterical voices blare over the radios of our nation

as if we were the only human beings on earth

and we alone, when we are burned, scream?

Never forget: we were taxpayers in Ancient Egypt.

Imagine if we, his armies, his consenting majority, had said to Pharoah

we will not be wielded against any more enslaved people,

any more unwilling subjects, any more laborers of the pyramid maquiladoras

in the name of your golden sarcophagus. You have put us in harm’s way.

The angry gods of the conquered do not distinguish

between kings and their subjects. We will not drown for you.

Hear, oh people, the man on television surprised by devastation into saying

that Manhattan looked to him that night just like Beirut, as if only Beirut

is supposed to look that way.

Imagine Beirut is your home

and it has looked like this for as long as you can remember.

Imagine you know that untouchable nation across the sea

has everything to do with your ruined city and then look again,

from the other side of the table, at Manhattan streets full of rubble,

Manhattan sending up plumes of smoke

and imagine what you might feel. Listen

to the indignant woman from Pennsylvania who wants to know

why she was not protected from this, who fell down on the job?

Who demands to know why the people of the greatest nation on earth are not immune

from the tragedies spawned in the ready rooms of our leaders?

Hear the call of the ram’s horn and rouse yourselves from the dream of comfort

Into the cold light of day. It is better to be awake than comfortable.

The illusion was bought on credit

and the street children of Brazil are our creditors.

Our creditors are the elders of Nigerian villages

Bulldozed by Chevron’s private armies,

Colombian coal miners gunned down for saying “union”

to Drummond Co. Inc., coal kings of Alabama, by thugs

paid for in the name of a fictitious war on drugs,

our creditors are the drowning island nations of the Pacific

disappearing in a warm and rising sea begging us to stop using

so much more energy than we need, inching their houses

closer together on their vanishing land

while Disney’s Electric Circus sparkles and dazzles

to the delight of shrieking children,

sticky with candy and ignorance, and late-night television hawkers

peddle gadget after gadget that does with electricity what,

for the sake of our suffering neighbors, we could do with our hands.

Our creditors are the millions of oil dead, ravaged nations of refugees

whose lives stood in the path of insatiable greed,

who were considered collateral damage, cost of production,

to expand the already swollen bank accounts of the obscenely rich.

Do people burn villages for profit and then buy television moments

to tell us there compassionate corporate nature

has saved a tiny butterfly called a Mission Blue? People do.

We did not sign these mortgages on our futures,

but our names were placed on the deeds

and we will be asked to pay.

Hear, oh bystanders certain of your innocence,

not one of the passengers, flight crew, office workers, fire fighters deserved to die

and neither are we innocent.

We have inherited the hatred of whole continents of the hungry,

been persuaded to accept the leftovers of their looted wealth as our civilized due,

taught to think of it as just a higher standard of living,

as if our shrinking ability to pay $35 for bluejeans made by a girl in Honduras for 85₵

was the result of a better upbringing, of our impeccable taste,

and not the random fortune of being born under the coattails of empire.

We are the heirs to the hatred our corporate masters earn faster than interest,

the invisible column in their quarterly reports,

and upon us will fall the fiery hand of the desperate.

Hear this: the lost humanity of the hijackers and the blazing deaths of the hijacked

have already been calculated into the annual overheads,

figured into the budgets as business as usual

and boards of directors have said amen.

Wake up, oh people, to the voices of our missing kin.

We have been lulled into forgetting them.

We are the grandchildren of starving Irish tenants,

kidnapped Senegalese teenagers and Ghanaian farmers,

refugees from wars between petty fiefdoms and principalities of Europe

and the drafts of the Tsar’s armies.

We are the descendants of English serfs and sheep shearers

fled from the pillage of the common lands. We are the children of daughters sold to traders for food

and sold again to strangers, dead of syphilis at twenty;

the children of Cantonese stowaways and Swedish orphans, of sailors pressed into service

and servants oppressed and indentured, of children wasted into pale shreds of the loom,

of foot-weary Neapolitan fruit vendors and raw-knuckled Polish laundresses,

Puerto Rican seamstresses and shtetl shirtmakers from Byelorus.

We are the children of Norwegian and Bavarian loggers

clearcutting white pine from the landscape for a pittance

and Portuguese codfishers emptying the Grand Banks for a crust,

of Cornish colliers coughing up blood in Sierra Nevada mines

and Scots Cherokee miners buried alive in Kentucky coal shafts.

We are the offspring of French fur trappers and Huron leatherworkers, smallpox survivors

and relocated Choctaw singers, Mexican war widows who walked to El Paso

one step ahead of the armies and Vietnamese families forever missing their children dead

along the long way out of horror. If we are also the children of slaveholders and Indian agents,

factory overseers, papermill millionaires and railroad robber barons,

then we are the long-sleeping conscience that can wake and shake the family tree.

Hear, oh people. This is the now. This is the day our ancestors dreamed

they would be the ancestors of. Our ancestors who are the cause of the eight-hour day,

of social security and workers’ compensation, of public libraries and cooperatives,

of weekends and sick leave and the right to bargain,

of there being anywhere to turn and of the vestiges of a free press still speaking

in the nooks and crannies of the corporate monotony drone they call news.

The freedom we have pledged our allegiance to does not yet exist,

wherever the seedlings of it are green it is because we the people planted.

We are the custodians of freedom, not the barking voices of warmakers.

The safety they tell us we have lost because of maniacal Muslims from a faraway land

was never real; most of the people in this country are not safe.

Many cannot walk down the street without being pulled over for being brown

and perhaps shot. Cannot open the window without breathing cancer. Cannot go to work

without soaking up birth defects. Cannot turn on the television

without being lied to. Cannot get healing when they are sick, no matter how sick they are.

Cannot do work that makes them proud to do it because all they can get paid for

is taking out the trash of others and making the parts that keep the machines of others running.

Can expect no destination except prison

because that is the only space that has been left vacant for them.

Liberty and justice for all is a rag shot full of exceptions.

We children of a thousand nations gathered in this homeland of hope and horror,

bribed with hot and cold running water, electric pencil sharpeners

and the prerecorded cheerleader’s chant that we are the best, best, best in the world,

we have been hypnotized by the fantasy that we are the freest of all people

to quietly accept the coup of the unelected, and the ravaging of the planet;

we are the passengers in a car driven by men drunk with plunder,

ricocheting through the world leaving trails of devastation:

we are the ones who must take the wheel,

stop this hurtling death ride, downshift into decency, not because we are wiser

than the crushed and bleeding in the streets, but because we are here.

We are not the designated drivers of the world:

we are designated to stop what we can reach.

Right now, as the men in the soundproof rooms demand war,

demand retaliation against insolent unknowns

who dare to boomerang bloodshed back into their spanking clean boardrooms, now

while the networks juxtapose burning buildings and smiling Muslim faces

getting us ready to accept whichever Middle Eastern war target they choose

to be their nation of expendable accomplices to crime; THIS is the moment

to ask these men who finance death squads around the world

and stand in the floodlights declaring they will not tolerate terrorism:

what have you done in our name that anyone should wish us such harm?

If we have not known, this is the time to know. If we have been unwitting,

this is the time to gather our wits. If we have allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed

by the delusion that we are helpless, the machine all-powerful

and the state of the world best left to others, most of them unborn,

if we have fallen into the blank narcotic dream of insignificance,

settled for the late-night promise of an exciting career

in dental hygiene or the thrill of a nicely packed 401k and a remodeled kitchen,

if we have fallen to our knees under the blows of complacency and ridicule,

it is not too late to forgive ourselves and rise.

Now is the time to quit the comforting drug of let it be cold turkey

and rise up shaking from the floors of our spirits with all of our ancestors around us.

Today is the day to insist that this nation rooted in conquest and slavery,

rooted in rebellion and righteousness, renew the meaning of our union

and become what we have never been except in the speeches of politicians.

Make true the proclamations of the senators and let us serve notice upon

the duly incorporated, legally registered, true and trademarked terrorists

who, to our undying outrage, have launched themselves from U.S. soil,

protected by U.S. armies, backed by U.S. money and U.S. law.

Cut their budget of tolerance and cash, for they have embezzled our honor

to finance a wave of crime against humanity.

Hogtie the global bullies

who have raised such hatred by their acts

that this tsunami of helpless rage has been hurled

against the members of our families.

Hold the bandits responsible for each beloved face gone

in the backlash of international loathing.

We do not absolve those desperate men of the murders of our people,

but we also name the killers of their peace; we know who it was

that robbed them of everything but desperation, who taught them

to trust weaponry, who treated their lives with such contempt

that they grew contemptuous of ours.

Shema, people of the United States of America,

infinitely divisible under their thumbs,

infinitely courageous, humble and just within our hearts

heirs to struggles of a hundred thousand righteous ordinary people

what peace will we make and with whom?

The winds of grief and fear have torn open the veil and we are shivering.

Step out of your doorways and see your neighbors.

There is untold wealth hidden among us.

Wally who is having bad dreams of Pearl Harbor

and is wrestling to find compassion for people he doesn’t understand

and doesn’t want them dead before he finds it, who says out load

“I have fought in three wars and I don’t want this one.”

Lucille who lost her husband under rubble, a firefighter,

and wants no fires set in his name to ravage any other life.

Jules who survived the deaths of six million of his relatives

and has gone to stand in front of a mosque and prevent harm.

Kim who says I don’t know much but I know this,

those towers were golden symbols of wealth in a hungry world

and I won’t wave a flag ‘til everyone has eaten.

Eric, who had a brother on that planeload of people who refused to be used as weapons

and says if he can be that brave so can I. I will not be hurled at anyone’s home.

A murdered poet in a land of volcanoes has told us

All together, they have more death than we,

but all together

every single heart beating in every time zone

desiring more than anything if the truth be told

the shared bread of justice, and the laughter of the ones we love

all together he said before he died, one and one and one and one

we have more life, more life, more life than they.

Hear oh people, this is our hope

and our hope is one.

–

Aurora Levins Morales is an award-winning writer, essayist and historian of Puerto Rican and Jewish descent. Her most recent works are Medicine Stories, a collection of essays on culture and politics and Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertoriqueñas.