Status Updates From Uncertain Ground: Citizensh...

Let's admit it: the days after 9/11 felt good. Not for my friends who lost family in the attacks. Not for the woman I know who barely made it out of the towers and has spent the past twenty years wondering why she survived and so many of her colleagues did not. But for most of the rest of us, our country was justifiably at war. War with noble purpose.

It increasingly seems to me that the certainty of earlier life was based on fantasies of an orderly future in a rational, controllable world, fantasies that were no more than the wish that the Leviathan might one day be tied down by force. That man, with his ever-increasing sophistication and technology, could come up with a set of rules about how states are to be built, how societies are to be governed...

And so, without quite knowing why, I went back to Mass for the first time in years. And I thought about how the world was not quite meeting my hopeful expectations. And Christ, looking back at me from the cross, blood dripping from the thorns in His crown and the wound in His side and the nails in His hands and feet, asked, "What on earth convinced you that it would?"

The real world did not mean the lives and hopes and dreams of ordinary men and women- it meant the war. It meant the stuff I cared about. As one Vietnam veteran put it: "I could not fathom how Vietnam could be anything to all Americans but the central concern of their lives; how it could be anything less than the dark sun around which we were all in unbreakable orbit as its doomed and somehow hopeless satellite."

As the numbers went more and more in the right direction, I felt less and less as if I were in a place of mystery and confusion, but in a rational, controllable world where the correct application of right thinking and right technique could tame chaos, tame the wild spirits of war and civic life, and move us toward a progressive, technocratically managed ideal of democracy and peace.