A Voice I Can’t Shake

I am numb, and in my numbness I hear a voice. The voice is right or it is wrong. The voice is half-right or it is half-wrong. And I feel no stronger ethical compunction in this moment of shock and nearby death than to ascertain whether the voice be right or wrong. For if it is right, my life must change. Not my outer circumstances, which must change anyway, but my inner goals and everyday intentions. I would have to change in a wrenching way. I prefer not. I don’t want to hear the voice. I want to stroke the foreheads of the victims, hearing their fading voices, and console the victims’ survivors and loved ones, hearing their anguished cries. But the other voice won’t go away, whispering urgently: You have been attacked; you are in danger of more attack. Who is the enemy? You are the enemy. Ask not to whom the ethical conscience points its finger of blame. It points to thee.

Yes, the extremists, the terrorists, have become incarnations of evil, but no one can be good lest all are good.

The voice tells me, I am comfortable, and in my comfortableness I have become indifferent to the plight of others. The voice tells me, I no longer know what empathy means. I have grown so much armor and self-protection for the things that I have, houses and coffee-grinders, cars and highways, knickknacks and art museums, books and movies, shares and stock markets, that empathy swirls around in a tight little circle. Do I have enough reserve capacity of ethical energy to break through this closed circle?

One expert on international affairs wrote, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, that "despite decades of cogent analyses of the objective reasons why this sort of terrorism was likely and even probable, the system has found it impossible to take it seriously." We failed to take seriously the threat of terrorist attack inside our own nation.

If we failed to take this seriously, what else have we failed to take seriously? The voice won’t leave me alone. It says we have failed to take seriously the oppression of peoples in less-capitalized regions of the world. It says we have failed to take seriously the oppression that is deliberately tolerated by our national and international policies. It says we have failed to take seriously the oppression deliberately generated by our policies. It says we have failed to take seriously the deprivations and oppression of large numbers of people in our own country.

A war against terrorism is called for. It must deal with terrorist cells actively planning more terror, but it must also deal with our own comfort and smugness, our own delimited empathy, our own heavy hand in the creation and maintenance of poverty and hopelessness in the wide kinship of humanity.

The voice worries me, for does anyone but a few others hear a similar voice? Will I be ostracized as a nut or a utopian or an impractical idealist? Will the voice subside after a while, and leave me alone? Perhaps it’s an alien presence in my head, and it will go away if I ignore it long enough. It feels, however, like it’s coming from my own heart, awakened from a nap, claiming rightful authority as my very own voice. The images of the airline jets smashing into the twin towers, the reactions of horror of people on the street, the last words of Americans in the planes or at the top of the towers to their loved ones on the phone—all these have numbed my everyday consciousness. Another voice has awakened from slumber.

Author: Robert Greenwell, Leader Intern, St. Louis Ethical Society and Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture