TBT: "Blood Begets Blood" September 11, 2001 letter-to-the-editor

I wrote this letter to the Fort Collins Coloradoan on September 11, 2001 (it was published a few days later). With the 20th anniversary of the date coming up, and with our recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to repost it. I chose to post it today rather than on September 11 because there is a political nature to it, and I wanted to avoid the actual date out of respect for the families and friends of the victims.

I feel the same today about this as I did 20 years ago.

Blood Begets Blood

Ross Cunniff, September 11, 2001

My heart cried out for blood when I heard the news this morning.  Bloody vengeance against those who had committed this unspeakable crime against thousands of innocent people.  And my heart was not discriminating: it wanted vengeance against all, past, present, or future, who had terrorized the world through their words and deeds.  It echoed the sentiments of persecutors past who said, "Kill them all; God will know His own!"

But my heart was wrong.

As the true enormity of what had happened slowly soaked in, I had time to reflect upon the world in which we live, and how it got to be this way: violence-soaked, reeling from action to hideous reaction.  A seemingly endless list of battlefields presents a macabre parade of ongoing feuds to our TV-jaded eyeballs.  Iran.  Iraq.  Kosovo.  Northern Ireland.  Palestine.  Macedonia.  Chechnya.  Peru.  Somalia.  In all of these places hatred has burned for hundreds or thousands of years, with no end in sight.  I realized that if I started advocating knee-jerk violence, I would just be adding my own name to the sad cast of those sad theaters.

And worse - by bringing fire down upon the heads of terrorist enemies, we are giving them exactly what they want: glory and a martyr's death, to keep their cause alive for another millennium.  The same is true for our domestic terrorists who commit their crimes against our schools and workplaces: death is no deterrent, as many of them commit suicide at the end of their rampage.  And we grant them immortality through the endless recycling of pictures of their carnage and its aftermath.  We even blaze the criminals' names and faces onto the front page of our newspapers to provide inspiration for the next generation of killers.  I hope that we can deny those responsible the fame that they seek, and will do my best to support efforts to condemn them to anonymity.

So, I will attempt to step into the future with my head up.  Let us bury and mourn our dead, heal our injured, console the grieving, and let justice do its work, as frustratingly slow as that can be.  Let us do our best to fix any security flaws which may have allowed this to happen in the first place.  But most of all, let us rely on our personal faiths for comfort, inspiration, and guidance.  My prayers go out to the families and friends of the victims, and to our leaders, emergency workers, armed forces, and our children.  May God grant us all wisdom and healing, even if we may never find understanding.

 My heart cried out for blood.  Now it just cries.