Radical Lessons: Thoughts on Emma Goldman, Chaos, Grief, and Political Violence Post–9/11/01

Introduction

Since that fateful day in September 2001, and in its terrible aftermath, I have often sought inspiration from a wider community of humans seeking to create a different, less terrifying, world.¹ In concluding her 1912 article, "The New Year," Emma Goldman boldly asserted, "Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty" (323).² Chaos is all too easy to feel these days. According to a U.S. State Department Fact Sheet some 3,212 people died in the September 11 attacks in the U.S., though undocumented workers likely remain undercounted in these figures. In 2006 Gilbert Burnham and colleagues "estimate[d] that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation. . . . About 601,000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes" (1426). In October 2008 the Web site "Just Foreign Policy" estimated that over 1,273,378 Iraqis have died in the bombing and occupation of that country; CNN reports over 4,500 coalition deaths in Iraq, with the death of U.S. soldiers now outnumbering the estimated State Department death toll of September 11, 2001.³ These figures say nothing of the maimed and scarred, nor do they speak to the civilians and combatants that continue to die in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Police actions, insurgencies, despotic acts of dictatorship, violent episodes of ethnic and religious hatred, class desperation, imperialism and nationalism rage throughout the globe in Chechnya, Pakistan, Burma, Palestine, Israel, Columbia, Kashmir, and in so many, many other places. And if these human struggles were not enough, environmental chaos caused by global warming brings ever more dire weather to threaten our communities and lives. Beyond these real world tragedies, Susan Faludi in her 2007 book The Terror Dream, unmasks the new gendered nightmare that has haunted the American cultural psyche in the aftermath of the events of 9/11/01, including the disappearance of women's voices as events are recast in heroic masculine terms embracing a new myth of super-men with females in need of protection. Yes, the world seems precariously chaotic these days. The chaos can become overwhelming.

In my experience, feelings of chaos are often intimate partners of grief and grieving. The Oxford Pocket American Dictionary places boundaries on the meanings of these powerful words. Grief's first meaning is "intense sorrow or mourning," its second "the cause of this"; to "grieve" is first to "cause great distress to" and second to "suffer grief" (346). The proximity among "grief," "grievance" and "grievous" cannot be missed when trying to grasp and ground these emotions in the concrete of dictionary definition. To mourn is to "feel or show deep sorrow or regret for" and to "show conventional signs of grief after a person's death" (517). Anyone who has experienced the loss of close loved ones knows the nature of this powerful emotion: its unpredictability, its numbness, its anger, its depth. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas write, "In each death there is an end of the world, and yet the rhetoric of mourning allows us to speak of this end and multiply it, both to anticipate it and repeat it—with regard not only to one friend, one proper name, but many, one death after another"(15).⁴

The events of 9/11/01 and its aftermath, let alone the other catastrophes the twenty-four hour news cycle brings us daily, have clearly brought distress, suffering, and strong emotions. Considering just the "day that shook the world," as the BBC referred to it, we can see the moments of collective grief in numerous places (qtd. in Winter and Hawthorne 11). At its most basic, we feel the mourning in nine-year-old Madeleine-Therese Halpert's haiku:

Terror in their eyesChildren now lost foreverInnocent like me

(88)

One wonders which children, in which regions of the world, the author is thinking of. Robin Morgan provides more political complexity to this reckoning of...