Patricia J. Williams's powerful observation yesterday at The Nation site, which has to do with what we get when we remix the Confederacy for 2015, strikes me as valuable commentary, too, on 9/11, as the United States remembers that event:
The reality of our resource-stretched and war-torn globe is that the categories in which we put people—legal or illegal, refugee or economic migrant, black or white—determine survival. We struggle for ground and bread and fresh water. We draw down the gates, pull up the drawbridges. We pray and pack in for a place on the freedom train—which grinds to a halt when "they" climb aboard. We take each lost life and stack it as a win or a loss for "our" people.
All lives do not matter when we must sort the dead by sides.
May all that have life be delivered from suffering, the Buddha famously observed, in a statement that became something of a prayer-refrain in the work of Virginia novelist Ellen Glasgow. If the Buddha's statement is a prayer, then I say Amen to it this 9/11 — with a strong emphasis on the word all.
The photo is from the Twitter feed of Joya Martin.
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