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Terror
and Humanity:
We
Will Grieve Now, But Then We Will Get Up Again
By
Sergio Troncoso
This one is for the thousands of
individuals who died yesterday. Those innocents. It's
hard to write this, to write anything. The fathers and mothers.
The children.
Brothers and sisters. They died for somebody's idea of a just
cause. But you were simply killing
innocents, can't you understand that?
The children visiting the top of the World Trade Center were simply
looking at the view. The mothers who
jumped out of these skyscrapers, in desperation, did not know about your just
cause and did not care about politics.
These innocents who died are America, and those who will mourn them
today will rebuild our great city and our great country in their honor. We don't have a choice but to rebuild and try
again to live in this sometimes nightmarish world. In these thousands who died amid an ordinary
Tuesday morning that metamorphosed into terror, we have a representation of
America. But that does not mean they
bear any individual or collective responsibility for your hate.
You hated them
simply because they were a disembodied 'America' in your mind, an abstract
idea, something easy to hate because you had already categorized them into
something distant, something you can't or won't touch, something far away you
will not have any discourse with. A thing. For you,
killing the Twin Towers was killing America.
Killing buildings was equivalent to killing people to killing a
country. All these 'things' were the
same, in your hate-filled mind, but you were wrong. You have killed innocents. You have killed individuals. You categorized us into this thing that you
hate, you idealized us into something wretched, and you went about trying to
kill this idea-thing with your horrible acts.
But you were wrong, and this is why America, this unique and wonderful
land of diversity, this expanse of individuals working together, cannot be
defeated by your hateful acts. We will
rebuild our country, and we will always remember those innocents who died
yesterday.
What I believe this
Tuesday should teach us, if we can still learn anything in our deepest grief
and shock, is that our ideas, when we turn them into hateful things, when we
categorize innocents into being disembodied entities, these ideas and the minds
that latch onto these idea-things for the sake of a warped clarity, they are at
the root of what is evil. To be human is
to engage with, to care about. To be
human is to love another. To be human is
to communicate with someone, even if you are only shouting at them. The most human of all is discourse. With nature. With other human beings. Even with other ideas. But when you prefer an island of clarity in
your mind, when you don't want to be contradicted, when you don't want to
defend your actions, then you will turn human beings, innocents, into
things. And then it so
easy to kill these 'things' in your mind.
But even if
America, that America of individuals working together, was deeply wounded on
this black Tuesday, even if thousands of us died because someone turned us into
a thing to hate in his mind, America will not be defeated. We will get up again. We will grieve. We may even hate for a while, too, because
our anger has reached unimaginable levels.
But we will fight against our hate, we will argue against it, in our own
minds, and we will finally put it aside as something at the root of evil, where
we do not want to go. And then we will
win our fight to be human. One day in
the distant future, one day perhaps far away, we will have a good day when we
don't cry anymore about those thousands of innocents who died yesterday. We will never forget them, but we will go on
with caring about, loving, and arguing with each other. And then, on another clear and sunny day,
when we should be taking our children to the park or to visit a famous
skyscraper or simply getting them ready for their first week of school, we will
be wounded again by someone who has not bothered to escape the idea-things in
his mind. And never shall we give up on
ourselves. Never. This one is for the thousands of individuals
who died yesterday. I wish I had known
every single one of them.
"Terror and Humanity: We
Will Grieve Now, But Then We Will Get Up Again"
was written on September 11, 2001, during the attack on the
Listen to Sergio Troncoso discuss his novel, The Nature of Truth, about righteousness
and evil, Yale and the Holocaust, on National Public Radio: 
NPR Interview on
Latino USA. Click
here for discussion questions.
Other essays: A Day Without Ideas, Fresh Challah, Imagine Ysleta,
and Latinos
Find an America on the Border of Acceptance.