Moments of Silence

Violence gets our attention, but we're incomplete without silence.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and JD Vance made what will almost certainly be their only joint appearance yesterday, at a 9/11 commemoration in New York City. They issued some statements and joined the public in a moment of silence for each attack that took place that day.

Silence? We’re told that over one-third of the people in this country have no personal memories of 9/11. For others, the images will never fade. I knew people who died there. I held onto my photo ID for World Trade Center’s North Tower for years as if it were a fetish object. But what I recalled yesterday was a little girl who was born that day and died by gunfire ten years later. (I wrote a column about her; there’s a lightly edited version of it below.)

We would need many more moments of silence to commemorate all the needless deaths. More than 44,000 people are killed each year in this country by gun violence, an analysis found. The annual death toll from mass shootings has rarely exceeded 100, but they never lose their ability to shock. (Yearly terrorism deaths have been in the dozens or less since 2001.)

In the face of sudden horrors, we often overlook the quiet tragedies. Violent deaths are easier to track and make better headlines. But people die in droves because they don’t have health insurance or are burdened with medical debt (a sign of under-insurance). They die from inadequate nutrition or because their communities are used as toxic dumping grounds. They die because their air has been fouled and their water poisoned. They die in ghettoes and on reservations, in cities and in dying rural towns.

We don’t know how many of these quiet deaths happen every year, but the total would almost certainly shock us. Silence versus violence: in the race for our attention, violence always wins. But without silence we are incomplete.

There’s a connection between our under-funding of social needs and our massive military budget. Our violent impulses and our neglect of mutual care reflect a disorder of the spirit we have yet to repair. Healing it will take courage, community—and, at times, silence.

There’s also a growing sense, still mostly subliminal, that we live in a declining empire. That doesn’t have to frighten us. But hidden fears loom larger, and we’ve been hiding that one for a while. This country is wealthy but won’t use its wealth to prepare us for the change we feel is coming. China isn’t the real threat; what we must confront is time. (James Brown said: “Money won’t change you, but time will take you on.”)

Whether by silence or violence, individual stories convey realities we can’t absorb through abstraction or quantification. What follows is the story of one child who died too soon. Multiply it twenty or thirty thousand times and it’s also the story of Gaza’s children today.

A Moment of Silence (published January 9, 2011)

It begins with a moment of silence.

“Poetry is about the grief,” said Robert Frost. “Politics is about the grievance.” 

This is a time of grief, not grievance. This morning I assembled a litany of criticisms about yesterday’s events. But that’s the work of politics, not poetry.  I’m not sure enough of my own motives to know if I’m responding appropriately. There is a time for self-vigilance, as well as vigilance toward the words and deeds of others.

The violent rhetoric pervades one side of the political debate. But the harsh tone is widespread. This culture is drug-sick from its addiction to violence: violence as entertainment, violence as communication, violence as a medium of human exchange. There is rhetorical and literal violence against women, minorities, those of different beliefs, against anyone who causes anyone else to recoil.

I don’t forgive Rudyard Kipling his racism or imperialism, and I know he wrote these lines in a different context. Still, they were brought to mind just now by a nine-year-old girl—a child who was born on 9/11 and died yesterday at a gunman’s hand:

We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

She deserves a silence all her own. Her name was Christina-Taylor Green, and she was in the third grade. She had just won her first elective office as a member of her school’s student council. She went to a shopping center meet-and-greet with Rep. Gabby Giffords because she loved politics. She had just taken her First Communion at the Catholic Church.

I was Christina-Taylor’s age when John Kennedy was murdered. Let’s hope that her generation doesn’t grow up equating politics and violence like mine did. That can lead to escapism, rage, and despair.

A nation that claims to live by Judeo-Christian principles seems not to have read the declaration in Proverbs that “violence covereth the mouth of the wicked.” How many more children will die because our words are those of anger, vengeance, and violence?

Kipling also said, “A people always ends by resembling its shadow.” That’s something all citizens of empire should take to heart. Which brings us back to us—all of us, today. Look at us. Listen to us.

The height of our furious rectitude lengthens the shadow that haunts us. How can we be sure our words won’t make that shadow a little taller, a little deeper, day by day until it darkens the stars? The shadow should look familiar. It’s the silhouette of someone who has whispered to us for a long time, whose name we’ve forgotten but who we’ve known too well for too long. It’s here. It’s always been here.

The shadow is patient, calm. It’s ready to listen if there’s something we want to say—something we’re dying to say, as the expression goes.

I choose silence.