September 11

By Jeff Long

Sept. 11 is tomorrow, and some may see it as just another Monday.

Some who live in this part of the country also may think of it as Day Three of the SEMO District Fair, featuring the Heartland Idol competition.

Despite the passage of years, many also know it as Patriot Day, an indelible red-letter day on the calendar.

Dr. Lily Santoro, associate professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University, likes to ask her students what they consider the top historical events of their lives.

Her charges, who are mainly millennials, never fail to choose the terrorism of 9/11/'01 in their top five answers.

A Missouri woman with whom I once worked, who had long experience living in the Middle East and in London, told me when she learned of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the failed effort that ended in a fiery field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, she had this immediate thought: "America, welcome to the family of nations."

The United States of America, at least the "lower 48," separated as it is from Asia and Europe by two oceans, had been largely immune since Pearl Harbor to the sort of violence imported from other lands.

That changed 16 years ago. What was all too common elsewhere had come home.

There was another Sept. 11 -- this one 60 years prior to our 9/11 -- that reminds us violence can have many fathers. Attacks need not be perpetrated by airplanes but indeed by that which comes from our own mouths.

On Sept. 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh, the legendary American aviator, spoke at a large isolationist rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

Lindbergh claimed in one breath to hate the persecution of Nazi Germany toward European Jews.

Yet with the next breath, the brave pilot of "The Spirit of St. Louis" suggested his feelings about Jews in his own nation: "Their greatest danger to this country lives in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government."

To careful listeners, there wasn't a whole lot of daylight between Lindbergh's remarks and the rhetoric of the German dictator.

A U.S. priest, Father Charles Coughlin, no friend of the Jewish people, said on a different occasion, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing" (Time, "Hate in America," Aug. 28, 2017)

What expla.ins such vitriol, such verbal garbage? Maybe Oscar Hammerstein had an answer in his legendary lyrics in the 1949 musical "South Pacific":

You have to be taught, before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught.

I wonder sometimes if good church-going people, people who casually remark about "being Jewed down," forget the leader of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was born, lived and died a Jew.

The most dangerous day-to-day weapon in the human arsenal is not a nuclear bomb.

No, it's the senseless talk that escapes our lips.

James, the brother of Jesus, put it well: "How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so" (James 3:5-6, 10).

It seems to me a lot of careless talk is going around these days.

All acts of violence have their roots in words. This is why condemning hate speech is such an urgent matter.

James knew it long ago. He knew unless people started governing their tongues, the church in Jerusalem had no chance to survive.

There is still time for us to heed the lesson.