This now 20-year-old story rings true today.
Professor Devon Peña asked us, “Was there an ecological explanation for the September 11 attack?” He posed this question in the final few moments of our first class meeting in Environmental Anthropology. It was three weeks after the mostly Saudi hijackers flew airliners into buildings in New York City and Washington, DC and a field in Shanksville, PA.
I had just started an LLM in Sustainable International Development at the University of Washington Law School and was about to get my first exposure to post-structural analysis. That’s where deep thinkers use deconstruction to convince themselves that all values are contingent. It came as a surprise to me, and I resisted it until it dawned on me that I use deconstruction when I cross examine expert witnesses. I left college for law school in 1975 thinking that the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, was correct; we choose who we want to be. He said the mountain is tall only because we choose to call it so.
Shiva, a civil engineer and city planner who was born and raised in Kerala, India said, “Well, the attack was clearly a response to the Crusades.”
Melissa most recently worked for a high adventure eco-tourism company that took wealthy clients to exotic places, and she was conflicted about its impact on the life ways of simpler people. She said, “Any explanation must take into account the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Vannia, convinced that Western patriarchal military industrial hegemony was to blame said, “It was a reaction to globalization.”
My classmates were PhD and Master’s degree students, the best and brightest products of our university system, and it seemed to me they were missing something. Wondering how ecology might explain why commercial airliners fly into buildings, I asked Professor Peña, “Does your question assume the complete absence of the element of human choice in explaining the attack?”
He said, “Absolutely, Michael, what do you mean by that?”
I replied, “It seems to me this event demonstrates only that evil exists and some people choose to commit evil acts.”
The class erupted in chaos, with most everyone yelling in my direction; it seems that I had challenged some receive wisdom.
Sharon, who used only lower case letters when referring to herself, asked, “How do we identify evil?” I protested that evil was a universal value and even Islam as I understood it would call the attack evil. I am less certain about that today. Peña cautioned us to be careful, and he launched into a speech about the relativity of evil.
I would soon learn that there are choices, and then there are choices.
A few weeks later, California Governor Davis called the alert, claiming there was a terrorist threat to several prominent bridges in the Western United States. Of course, he was concerned about the Golden Gate Bridge, which is as much an icon to American success as the World Trade Center. But we have bridges in Seattle, too; I watched the I-90 floating bridge over Lake Washington sink one stormy Thanksgiving weekend ten years earlier.
When I got home from work the day Governor Davis said our bridges were at risk, my wife told me she was waiting at the children’s school bus stop when she saw a Middle Eastern looking man park his car in an odd place near the bus stop, where he walked down to the lakeside and looked at the I-90 bridge with binoculars while speaking to someone on his cell phone. She called the police to make a report as soon as she got home.
Everybody was on edge. Anthrax poison was passing in the mail then, some people who handled the mail died, and nobody knew where it was coming from.
The next day, I was returning to my office after a meeting north of the city when I saw him. I’m sure he was not the same fellow my wife saw. Looking back on it, I recall that he looked like he had been sleeping in his clothes.
I was stopped at a traffic light, and I noticed a Middle Eastern guy who was waiting to cross the street in front of a rental car lot. He had three gym bags with airline claim check stickers that made me think he just got off an airplane. I don’t know why, but I watched him. He was a small fellow with an unkempt beard, and he didn’t look at anybody. He didn’t look at the traffic, he didn’t look at the women standing next to him, he didn’t look at anybody. He looked down. He looked guilty. I couldn’t not look at him.
When the light changed, he picked up his bags, and they were obviously very heavy. I drove ahead and I pulled over and stopped and watched him in my rear-view mirror as he walked down the street. There was a mailbox at the next corner, and he stopped. I watched him reach into one of his bags, take something out of the bag, put it in an envelope and put it in the mailbox. Convinced that I was witnessing a terrorist attack in the making, I had to call the police, and I reached for my cell phone.
As I was telling the police dispatcher what I had seen, a motorcycle officer came down the street, and I jumped out of my truck and flagged him down. He pulled over and said, “What can I do for you?” I told him what I had seen, I said something was very odd about this man’s behavior, and I gave him my business card and I left. I was terrified and shaking with fear.
About an hour later, Officer Mike Henry called me and asked me to repeat exactly what I had seen. He said the fellow admitted putting two envelopes in the mailbox; they had called the postal inspector, and they were going to check some things out. He called me back at the end of the day.
He said they had to let the guy go. He was a U.S. citizen from the Middle East who had lived in the U.S. since age one. The postal inspector opened the mail box and, to be careful, she seized the two letters for inspection. Officer Henry said, “It got real interesting when I asked him for his identification and he handed me a Florida driver’s license.” Some of the 9-11 hijackers lived in Florida
I asked him, “What was in his bags?”
Officer Henry replied, “All of his life’s possessions.” The fellow was on hard times and he was on his way to Alaska, looking for work.
He said, “You did the right thing.” I think I had no choice.
And now I’m sure that the reason this fellow looked so guilty and the reason why he wouldn’t look at anybody is that for the last six weeks everybody around him had been accusing him of being a terrorist. After all, aren’t they all? He probably couldn’t even get a room to rent and was forced to sleep in shelters or outside in the elements.
I wish I could find him and give him a hundred dollars and say I’m sorry. I’d like to tell him that sometimes we make choices and sometimes, whether we like it or not, the choices are made for us.
Your story really speaks as to the value of not making quick assumptions about other people based on their appearance. I’m sure that man faced a lot of prejudice because people assumed that everyone of his ethnicity were terrorists, and you likely added to his fear. And yet people who consider themselves liberal and progressive today are stoking these fears, claiming that all people of X race/gender/sexual orientation must be all evil simply for their identity. We’ve lost the human element and live in fear.