There were still more violations. Old people and the poor became silent victims of the burgeoning events as campaign promises of relief for expensive drugs and of insurance for the vulnerably uninsured were shoved aside.

     "Yes, I call CEOs `honey.' but to me, that's wry Texas humor," laughed the woman appointed by ex-Governor Bush to persuade the Muslim world that the U.S. is not the enemy. The Madison Avenue executive went on to describe her style at client meetings: "I'm likely to say the most outrageous thing in the room--to liven things up." ("Muslims, honeys, we're not for y'all, just against y'all. Just kiddin', honeys, jumblin' up words like my boss, to get your attention an' liven things up.")

     To assert its alerted consciousness to critical matters, the Supreme Court considered definitions of ... pornography. Antonin Scalia, looking more and more like a judge of the Inquisition, made a startling admission: "I don't know what simulated sex is." Even within his busy schedule in keeping track of terrorists--unsuccessfully--Attorney General John Ashcroft (as fanatic a Christian fundamentalist as are some Afghans about their own Muslim fundamentalism) found time to file a suit against Oregon's right-to-die ordinance.

     Amid the chaos, there remain memories of acts of courage. The passengers on the hijacked Boeing 757 on flight 93, alerted by cell phones that they were on a forced mission of destruction, took over the airplane, choosing to crash it in a field that would kill no one but them and the terrorists. (The deserved celebration of those men and women does not undermine the unknown acts of those on the other disastrous flights, who were not aware, until the exact moments of horror, that they were being used to assault the Towers and the Pentagon.) There were equally courageous individual acts--most of them unrecorded--of people who helped others, often the handicapped, out of the fiery inferno of the Towers; and there were the men and women of organizations aiding survivors of the victims in America as well as victims of the bombings in Afghanistan.

     There were moments that stirred joy: Photographs of Afghan women removing their veils, symbols of their brutalization; a picture of an Afghan soldier placing a flower in the mouth of his rifle while Taliban forces fled.

     As the flags that proliferated after the bombings in America grow old--strips of red, white, and blue often fall along freeways, whipped up by speeding cars--there are new, daily realities to cope with: The reality depicted by photographs of long lines of displaced Americans applying for a few jobs; accounts of families waiting for promised relief in seeking new shelter while they attempt to renew their altered lives; photographs of other families, Afghan families, huddled in rags, fleeing the bombings against a drought-seared gutted background of desolation.

     The bombs continue to drop--along with packages of food containing messages informing Afghan civilians that the bombs may fall on them but they are not aimed at them. Delivered by airplanes in the dark morning hours, some food packages crash into mud-brick dwellings, injuring people. Some packets land in mined areas.

     While Bin Laden hides after unleashing new violence on a ravished country as a result of the murders in America, more than 6 million Afghan civilians--as innocent as the thousands who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, as innocent as the Afghan civilians who have died in the bombings--face starvation during the freezing winter in a country of entrenched poverty. News photos of ragged children haunt almost daily now, some--who have never known a time of peace--scavenge through garbage; others roam deserted streets. Those children inevitably reveal pained, ancient eyes, eyes that don't seem to know whom to accuse.

     The horror, the horror.

John Rechy
November 28, 2001
     

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.