A hostile global village

Christian Century, Sept 11, 2002 by Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

"We live in a globalized world, only I can't go there." So said a young American soon after 9/11. Whatever truth there may be in the belief that "everything has changed," much has certainly changed for the youngest of us. Coming to world-awareness in the '80s and '90s, American youth had many reasons to feel that they were stepping into a wide-open society. The cold war was over, with the U.S. on top. One read regularly of 30-year-old "Dot.com" millionaires. You could pick up your cell phone and call a friend in Tokyo. It was a world without borders, with Internet, e-mail, CNN--and that glittering stock market. Windows on the World: what a great name for the top floor of the World Trade Center.

Abruptly our unalloyed optimism did change. Americans were put on notice that our country has engendered resentments which can yield exquisitely planned murder. The unkindest cut in our national self-esteem and security was this: the terrorists targeted us for what some of us may have done but for which they deem all of us responsible. A yellow Star of David once identified Jews in Nazi Germany as public enemies simply for being Jews. We now have our own taste of vicious identity politics. An American accent can make us targets of terrorist choice anywhere in the world.

Depressing? Yes, but especially for the optimistic American young. Somehow we who wanted to be their teachers did not adequately warn them that the global society bursting upon us is suffused with limits: limits of power, wealth, security and virtue on all sides. It turns out that the wealthiest, most militarily powerful nation in history is vulnerable to other powers, other perceptions of justice, and hatreds based on alien critiques of American goodness.

What have we all to learn from this, our new experience of vulnerability? How shall we sort out the true from the false perceptions of ourselves across the spectrum of human opinion worldwide? Is global friendship possible now in the face of global enemies? What might God be telling us in it all? Such questions were not on the mental horizon of American 15-year-olds a few years ago; they are now.