Kumbaya Watch: We’re All Terrorists Now
The latest in anti-American commentary.

By Ross Douthat
September 20, 2001 12:00 p.m.

he "religious" Left has begun to weigh in, and the results aren't pretty. In the wake of the bombings, "we need to ask ourselves," says Michael Lerner, the editor Tikkun magazine, "what is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people? And why is it that our immediate response to violence is to use violence ourselves — thus reinforcing the cycle of violence in the world?" Not why did the terrorists do it, you see, but how did we make them do it. Naturally, he has an answer: "We may tell ourselves that the current violence has 'nothing to do' with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food ... We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us ... But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives. The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes the minds of these terrorists." We can't feel the pain of others, they can't feel the pain of others — heck, we're all terrorists now.

The proper response to terror, then, is not "a new climate of fear and intimidation," but a climate of "love and caring, ethical/spiritual/ecological sensitivity, and an approach to the universe based on awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation (what I call an Emancipatory Spirituality)." Indeed, these bombings provide an opportunity for America to wake up, look itself in the mirror, and realize that "the best defense is a world drenched in love, not a world drenched in armaments."
Alas, Lerner says, the wicked Republicans — abetted by craven liberals — have already "manipulated our legitimate outrage and channeled it into a new militarism and a revival of the deepest held belief of the conservative worldview: that the world is mostly a dangerous place and our lives must be based around protecting ourselves from the threatening others." How silly, when everyone knows that "protecting ourselves" and treating the world as a "dangerous place" will only feed the "cycle of violence." No, for Lerner and his dreamy ilk, what the world needs now is love, sweet love — and, of course, a healthy dose of "Emancipatory Spirituality."