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Reflections At Ground Zero by Frank Morales
She said my name had come up in discussions as somebody who might have the stomach for such an assignment. I said I’d take the shift from 11 p.m. to seven a.m., feeling, like many, that I could be useful there, that I could help. Little did I realize then that it was I who would be helped, I who would gain from the wisdom that was smoldering there. Walking down Lower Broadway into the heart of darkness I could smell the stench of death, a perfume, I thought later, of a sacrificial fire, a human pyre, deeply sacred in its essence. After I passed through the last of the National Guard checkpoints, I was escorted to a series of tents set up along the Hudson, facing due east, situated in the belly of the monster. I stood with dozens of firefighters and construction and rescue workers within what appeared at moments to be some kind of opera set. In front of me in a semi-circle, floodlit in the dead of night, I could see the entire devastation: on the right, the spiked remains of the south tower, the lower portion of which reminded me of the Parthenon, an earlier testament to a doomed civilization; to the left, a 2000°F pit, the infernal ruin of the north tower. The entire deathscape was cast in front of me like a remake of Apocalypse Now; I could see the tiny machines and people traverse the mountains of twisted steel and rich brown earth, a picture to defy comprehension. Standing there, I was approached by a firefighter, a 40-ish, football-player looking guy from Queens; I never got his name. He told me he’d been there since immediately after the catastrophe. Spitting up blood and popping antibiotics, he said the wives of his friends buried somewhere beneath the burning toxic earth were calling him every day and asking him if he’d found their husbands yet. I told him to go home, that he was sick. He looked at me and said, “I know I’m going to lose 10 years of my life here, but I can’t let my buddies down. I can’t go.” Then, perhaps recognizing that I was somewhat overwhelmed by the devastation around us, he said, “Father, look at the earth. The people are in it.” He motioned to me to examine the soil I was standing in. It was rich and moist, enriched with the ground-up bodies of the dead. My feet inside my boots began to tingle. I had truly arrived in hell. I was moved to utter, possibly for his benefit, “Hey, if I had somebody in this mess, I’d be pissed as shit, and yeah, I’d wanna get those motherfuckers.” He put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Hey, it’s not about that.” He drew near to my ear. “You wanna know something? Bush and bin Laden have the same banker.” Later, another firefighter would advise me that the whole situation was one of “rich people fighting over oil with all of us caught in the middle.” The Lesson
of Ground Zero For beneath the uninformed m.o. of the long-distance bomber and the long- distance armchair warrior is a lack of appreciation of death up close. Living with the dead, squeezing their bloody acre between your fingers, lifting small bits of fingers from beneath your boots, placing the pieces in small red plastic seal-up bags, one loses the ability to replicate the violence, loses the desire to duplicate that which one becomes akin to: the murder of innocent people. For the people at Ground Zero, death was real and hence not to be taken lightly. All night I found no one who was in any kind of mood to inflict that which we were living in on anyone else. It was instinctively not viable. Slowly the lesson of Ground Zero dawned on me, the lesson that the vicious circle of violence breeding violence was passé here, a bad joke foisted upon a dehumanized complicit public, unsupported by those in the know at the Ground Zero of moral wisdom. Of course, this explains the documented inability of many World War II soldiers to kill anyone, even a manufactured “evil one,” in a direct one-on-one confrontation (see Dave Grossman, On Killing, Little Brown, 1996). Yet, while we do all in our power not to kill, we are manipulated into pulling the trigger—they kill in our name. An Inoculation
Against Murder As dawn approached, men covered in the grey-brown soot that was everywhere approached me as if in a fit of elation, saying they had found an intact body of a young girl. In those circumstances, this was cause for muted celebration. I tagged along with them to the boiling pit that had been the north tower. Emblazoned with a U.S. flag fitted with the image of a Native American with a peace pipe, a cherry picker lowered in the lonely place of death to retrieve the girl in a striped dress and raised her from the dead, resurrecting her identity and placing her at my feet. We gathered there in the smoke and flames and despite the inescapable stench prayed for her spirit, her family, for one another and for this broken world, in that exiled place. Frank Morales is an Episcopal priest and a squatter activist. |
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few
days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I received a call
from a staffer at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine who asked me if
I would go downtown, through the checkpoints that had been set up after
the bombings, to perform last rites for the dead. “Frank,” she said, “we’re
really not talking bodies here, you know. It’s mostly body parts.”