The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Outside the office building downtown, I sit in the parking lot and listen to the radio. Newscasters are describing the scene in faraway Manhattan: smoke and fire and everyone running for cover. I take the elevator to the sixteenth floor, introduce myself to the receptionist, and sit down on a couch in the waiting room. There is a television on the wall. Journalists are interviewing onlookers about what they have seen, microphones in their faces, cameras and eyes on the burning tower, as a plane crashes into the second tower, and the newscasters each say, “Oh my God.” A woman calls me into her office to interview me for a job that just this morning I was desperate to have, but if she asks me any questions, I do not hear them, and if I give any answers, they do not sound like human speech.

  Back at my older sister’s house in the suburbs, she and I are watching the news, where they keep playing footage of the planes crashing, over and over; footage of the towers crumbling, over and over; footage of people jumping out of the buildings and falling, their clothes blown loose and flapping. We watch stone-faced journalists break down in tears. We hold hands, sit close together on the couch. My younger sister calls to wish me happy birthday but instead says, “Oh God,” and I say, “Oh my God,” even though I have just decided once and for all that I do not believe there is one.

  “Tonight I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve,” President Bush tells us from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, “for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened.” My sister and I watch this address from the couch in her living room, where we have been sitting all day, a bottle of whiskey between us. We are afraid to move, afraid to leave the house, afraid to look away from the flickering spectacle that is President Bush and his steel-gray tie. “I pray they will be comforted by a Power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.’ ”

  * * *

  The next morning I shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee while my sister lights two cigarettes, hands one to me. We have not slept all night, or if we have slept at all, it is only in fits on the couch. The front page of the New York Times has announced “U.S. ATTACKED; President Vows to Exact Punishment for ‘Evil,’ ” and pins responsibility for the “thousands” of deaths on Osama bin Laden, a name most of us have never heard before. We learn throughout the day that he is a Saudi prince, the leader of a terrorist group called al-Qaeda, that he wears his beard long and his head wrapped, and that, with this attack, he has declared war on the United States. Our mother calls to tell us that our aunt, who works in the Pentagon, is safe and accounted for. She recently had foot surgery and had struggled to walk on crutches, but when it came time to escape she found that she could run.

  All day we watch reports about Osama bin Laden, and each time the newscasters talk about al-Qaeda and the Taliban, they show video of a call to prayer. Slurs have been graffitied on the wall of the mosque in town, though that is not reported on the news. Instead, there are reports that the group of men who managed to crash the flight destined for Capitol Hill called their wives and mothers from the plane before rushing the cockpit. They are heroes, we are told. This scene—of the men rushing the cockpit and crashing the plane in a field in Pennsylvania—joins the others that play on a loop over and over while I am in the shower, or shopping for groceries for the first time in days, or filling my car up with gas: the second plane hitting the tower, the firemen rushing up into the tower, the man jumping and falling from the tower, his white shirt fluttering like wings.

  The attorney general appears on television claiming that he knows the identities of the eighteen hijackers but gives almost no information about their names or their nationalities—only that they were “Middle Eastern.” Envelopes dusted with anthrax begin arriving in the mailboxes of journalists and politicians in Washington and New York. Now there are estimates that more than three thousand people died in the attacks. There are reports that a seventy-six-year-old man in South Huntington, New York, tried to run a Pakistani woman down with his car; that two teenagers have thrown a Molotov cocktail onto the roof of a convenience store owned by Arab Americans in Somerset, California; and that in Phoenix, a Sikh-American gas station owner, who wears a beard and a turban in accordance with his faith, was shot five times while planting flowers outside his Chevron station. When the shooter is arrested, he declares to police, “I am a patriot! I stand for America all the way!” In Dallas, a Pakistani immigrant has been shot to death in his convenience store. Middle schoolers in Texas have been charged with making terrorist threats against a schoolmate of Indian descent. My sister and I watch the mailman from behind the blinds. We also watch the delivery man, our neighbors, people driving by the house in their beat-up Toyotas. She keeps the silver revolver in one of her dresser drawers. It is loaded.

  A little more than a week after the attacks, President Bush addresses a joint session of Congress to make the case for war: with Osama bin Laden, with al-Qaeda, with the Taliban, in Afghanistan, and in any other nation that provides aid or safe haven to terrorism. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” he says. I can hardly watch with my stomach turning to ice. My sister and I keep the lights off in the house, the bottle of whiskey between us on the couch. “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war,” President Bush tells Congress, “and we know that God is not neutral between them.” Later, people will say, That was the moment he became president. All I can think about are the people on the planes, in the mailroom, the man in the convenience store, the children who watch bombs fall from the sky, the various ways they might try to hold on to one another, or to themselves.

  * * *

  This is the story I think of now when my son asks me to tell him what I know about evil. He is six, born nearly a decade after the attacks, and though evil has only recently entered his imagination, he has quickly become obsessed. Tonight it will take the form of a long, slinking animal with sharp teeth and slick fur in the dark under his bed—or something that has folded itself flat, like only a shadow can, to fit under the pile of his shirts in the closet. It will curl into baskets on the shelf, into each drawer of his dresser, behind his open door. The evil he believes in does not rest: it keeps vigil when it is sunny or cloudy, summer or winter, morning or night.

  My son suffers from no particular affliction beyond one we all share. He is afraid of dying, of the malice of strangers, a fear that he expresses sometimes by crying and sometimes by clinging to my shirt, a fear that surpasses all appeals to logic and reason. My son is six years old and does not believe in logic and reason. This is his life: he eats breakfast, goes to school, learns to read, plays soccer on the playground with his friends, practices tae kwon do, eats dinner, takes a shower, and all the while his fear of being consumed or possessed by some shadowy evil thing keeps him from his own room, from his toys, from the comfort of his bed. He can’t go to sleep alone, will not do it, and if he wakes in the middle of the night and finds himself with his fear of the evil in the dark, he leaves his room and comes immediately to mine.

  My son is afraid of evil because he believes the stories he has been told on television and in movies. A bedroom door creaks open, and the bogeyman jumps out from behind it as my son also jumps in his seat. A shadow is only a shadow until it becomes something with teeth, a possibility that seems, at least to my son, entirely real. He doesn’t know about CGI, doesn’t believe me when I explain that these are actors wearing makeup and masks. He hears on the radio that evil men are bringing death and destruction to our hemisphere, and he believes it is only a matter of time before they arrive at our door. Increasingly he is told that he won’t recognize evil when he sees it because it can look like any stranger, or like a neighbor, or a friend.

  * * *

  I heard my first stories about evil when I was around my son’s age while sitting cross-legged on the checkered tile floor of the second st
ory of the First Baptist Church in my hometown, while the deacon’s wife read a picture book she held open on her lap. David is a hero, the book told us, but Goliath is a monster: six feet tall or nine feet tall, depending on whom you asked. He wore gilt armor on his shins and forearms and also on his chest; a bronze helmet with a bright red plume rose above his bearded face; he raised a spear above his head, aimed it, prepared to bring it down. He charged, open-mouthed, unafraid of the small boy with delicate European features who faced him with a leather sling in his outstretched hand. This boy was good, the deacon’s wife told us, because his people were favored by God. Their enemies, the Philistines, were evil because of their worship of false idols, their warmongering ways, the ritual sacrifice of their children. “They were so evil,” she whispered, “they were barely even human.”

  The moral of this story was clear to me then, even if she didn’t state it explicitly: there are people whose religion is different from ours, and whose language is different from ours, and their food is different from ours, and if they are different in all of these ways, their morals must also be different from ours—all upside down or backward, where good is evil and evil is good. It is morally good to fight them; it is virtuous to win.

  * * *

  In the decades since I sat cross-legged on that checkered tile floor, I’ve learned how stories work, and so I know now that for every story we tell, there are countless more that are left out, that go untold, and what the deacon’s wife’s picture book left out in this story of David and Goliath is that the people we call the Philistines were a tribe encompassing perhaps thirty thousand people at its height, that they likely emigrated from Greece, that they made pottery, mourned and buried their dead, planned their towns carefully, and took great pride in their cultivation of olive trees. But that is not what we think of when we think of evil, and the deacon’s wife was not known for her nuances. I understand now what I may have only suspected then: that any story that cannot accommodate nuances is not interested in truth, but in obscuring it instead.

  Then, as now, the idea of evil creates fear, and people who are afraid are more easily controlled. I turn on the radio in the morning while cooking breakfast and hear that ISIS is waging jihad against the United States. We are told that “radical Islam” represents an evil like the world has never seen before. Terrorists are evil, we are told; so are serial killers, drug dealers, gang members and immigrants, murderers, warmongers, and all those lurking in our prisons. We hear the word evil applied to anyone who opposes us, or threatens us, or sometimes simply disagrees with us. Hitler was evil. Osama bin Laden was evil. Saddam Hussein was evil. Fidel Castro was evil, as was Chavez in Venezuela. Putin is evil, except now that he isn’t. Kim Jong-Un is evil, as is Bashar al-Assad. We hear this on the radio, see it on television and in movies, read it in newspapers, hear it from the lips of the president of the United States. Increasingly we are told that we won’t recognize evil when we see it because it can arrive in the form of the peaceful teachings of whole religions, whose followers harbor secret hatred for us, intend only harm toward us and our way of life, against whom we are fighting a global existential war for all that is good and righteous. And, we are told, we are losing.

  * * *

  “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it,” Simone Weil wrote in 1933 as she contemplated the various temptations to which she was inclined to succumb, such as the impulse to turn against others when the world falls apart. The world has always been falling apart, it seems, and the idea of evil has always been available to us to describe those who engineer its destruction.

  On January 29, 2002, four months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, President Bush delivered his famous “Axis of Evil speech” to Congress, saying that “a terrorist underworld . . . operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities,” that, in fact, our “war on terror” would not stop with Afghanistan but might extend to the Philippines, Bosnia, Africa, and Pakistan, places where they kill women and children, where they hold families hostage in their homes, where they think only of poison and weapons; that the nature of certain nations is hostile, murderous, corrupt. No one applauded as these words echoed through the chamber and into my sister’s living room, and across the world, where, I learned much later, that twenty-five hundred American troops had already deployed to Afghanistan, where roughly three thousand Afghani civilians had already died as a result of our airstrikes, though some estimates put the number closer to forty-five hundred. Or twenty thousand. The estimates vary. No one knows for sure. No one has bothered to keep track.

  A year later, in March 2003, President Bush again addressed the nation on television to warn us about an evil regime with a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East, “a deep hatred of America,” and in possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Diplomacy was not an option, he explained, because “when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.” Three days later, 130,000 US troops invaded Iraq; the government collapsed within three weeks. That December, US soldiers found the former dictator, Saddam Hussein, hiding in a six-foot-by-eight-foot bunker outside his hometown of Tikrit. In December 2006 he was hanged for “crimes against humanity” for the execution of 148 Iraqi Shiites, though he has been blamed for hundreds of thousands more. When asked for comment, President Bush said of the hanging, “He was given justice. The thousands of people he killed were not.”

  * * *

  The difference between good and evil is “the first idea the child must acquire,” Maria Montessori writes, but as I contemplate how to explain evil to my son, I admit that it is a difference I still do not fully comprehend.

  It’s been a decade now since Bush was president, and we are still at war. As I write this, we have more than ten thousand troops in Afghanistan, and in the sixteen years since President Bush sent troops there, nearly forty thousand civilians have died violent, gruesome deaths. In Iraq, more than a hundred thousand Iraqi troops perished while defending themselves against President Bush’s crusade against evil, and together those troops and our troops have claimed nearly two hundred thousand additional civilian lives.

  Is the world safer now? In the past few months, hate crimes are on the rise again, reaching nearly the same level as right after the attacks. Recently a mosque under construction near Austin, Texas, was burned to the ground, as was a mosque in Victoria, Texas. In Kansas, a man shouted, “Get out of my country!” before shooting two men he believed to be Iranian, killing one and also striking a third man who intervened to protect the others. A Florida man tried to burn down a corner store whose owners he believed to be Muslim in order to “run the Arabs out of our country.” A man in Salem, Oregon, called an employee at a Mediterranean restaurant “a terrorist” before attacking him with a metal pipe he referred to as his “horn of Gabriel.” This man told the authorities who arrested him that he perpetrated this attack because he is on a “warrior’s path.” In Washington, a man put on a mask and approached his thirty-nine-year-old Sikh neighbor, telling him, “Go back to your own country,” before shooting him in the arm. What is perhaps most shocking about these crimes is that the people who commit them do not believe their actions are harmful or wrong or evil in any way; rather, they believe that what they are doing is in fact righteous and good.

  Customs and Border Patrol agents detained a five-year-old American citizen for three hours at Washington’s Dulles Airport because his mother was born in Iran. This boy is nearly the same age as my son, and video shows him clinging to his mother when he is released, just as my son might cling to me. She sings “Happy Birthday” to him and showers him with kisses as she carries him to safety. He is wearing a red shirt and buries his face in her neck. What wouldn’t we all give to be carried to safety by someone we love? The White House press secretary justified this particular detention in a briefing: “To assume that because of someone’s age or gender
they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.”

  Make no mistake: these are acts of fear. Fear of possibility, of unpredictability, of the unknown. These men know nothing about the people they are harming—whether they are Iranian or Indian or Sikh; whether they practice Christianity or Hinduism or the peaceful teachings of Islam. None of us knows what is in another person’s mind and heart.

  We human beings are not born with prejudices. Always they are made for us by someone who wants something. We are told that we have enemies who hate us, who want to make war with us, that they will come to destroy our way of life, that they are coming to destroy us, that their arrival means we are already destroyed. This is not the full story or even a particularly true one. Even as I write this, the American military is dropping bombs from drones, flying bombs on rockets, planting bombs underground. We drop bigger bombs than have ever been dropped, bombs that can kill people we call our enemies from miles away. We call our bombs “mother.” We drop bombs on mothers and their children. The images of their bodies, if we see them at all, do not move us as they should.

  * * *

  I have an opinion on evil that I know is not very popular: I don’t really believe it exists. I don’t believe that any person arrives in this world predisposed toward another’s destruction, which is not to say this isn’t something we all learn. We learn to see evil in others because we do not wish to acknowledge a painful truth: none of us is as good as we imagine ourselves to be. This is not to say I don’t believe in malice and destruction and moral depravity. I do. I see evidence of it every day. I see how we teach ourselves to hate one another and, in our hatred, to destroy. I believe in the harm that stories can do, but also in their power. If people can tell stories that cast shadows where there are none, perhaps stories can also shed light where there is darkness, and can promote understanding where there is confusion and fear.