To Be EQUAL

The Pain of Those Left Behind

by Marc H. Morial

President and CEO, National Urban League

Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, is the former two-term Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and author of the weekly column in MaximsNews.com,  TO BE EQUAL

             NEW YORK - 17 March 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -  Madrid, separated from the United States by a great ocean, feels eerily, tragically close now. 

I recall the effort Tom Ridge, now, America’s Homeland Security chief but then Governor of Pennsylvania, made September 11, 2001 to describe the terrorist attack on America as he inspected the scene of devastation in the western Pennsylvania field where one of the doomed jetliners had crashed.  

“[I]rrational, cowardly, despicable, unconscious, immoral,” were the words he used while looking at the rural site where the debris of the plane lay scattered in tiny pieces.

He tried to define his emotions, which he said ranged from rage to anger to sorrow to horror to a sense of nausea, but quickly gave up.  “The dictionary is inadequate,” he said.  “There aren’t enough words.”

The dictionary remains inadequate now, as Spain has learned to its own great sorrow. 

            For all the bloodshed we have seen in recent years—in Rwanda, in the Balkans. In Indonesia, and here in America—the Madrid commuter-train bombing leaves one stunned, again, at the unbelievable capacity of some human beings to inflict such violence on other human beings.

            Who are these people who are capable of such barbarism?  We search for an explanation. 

By that, I’m not referring to their political or religious beliefs.  No, those false beliefs are just both the primer that unleashes their savagery and the rationale they use to obscure their own evilness to themselves. 

I’m referring to their psychological makeup.  That’s what is even more frightening.

            It is, of course, the shock of the scale of the attack that provokes this feeling, and the memories it conjures up for us—memories which we have from a similar calamity having happened not just in faraway places but in our own land.

            It’s the memories of the havoc that occurs when the equipment and machinery and conveniences of modern society are transformed into implements of terror.

It’s the shock of realizing how physically fragile we human beings are and how violent death often robs its victims of all physical dignity at the very moment we survivors would want them to be wrapped in the grandest nobility.

It’s the demonstration, once again, of the murderous intent we are now too familiar with of some to do as much harm to as many innocent people as possible.

 It’s the memory that no amount of public mourning can ever really diminish the pain of those left behind who knew the victims not as a statistic, but as husband or wife, brother or sister, mother, father, son, or other family member, as colleague, as friend.

But it is the duty of those left behind to stand up for the innocents who were lost, to tell the world of the goodness and decency that was taken from us by the barbarism of others.

That is what an estimated eleven million citizens of Spain—one-fourth of the country—did last weekend as they took to the streets of Madrid and other communities across the country to grieve for the victims of the Madrid bombing.

Their words, their very presence was not merely a defiance of the reign of terror those responsible for the attacks seek to impose on us all.  It was a declaration of resistance to that despicable purpose.

The massed presence of the crowds, alternately vociferous in their anger and silent in their grief, was itself a demonstration of the most important characteristic of humankind:  its sense of humanity—of decency, of compassion and respect and love for others.

There are other weapons that have to be brought to bear against the murderers, weapons wielded by the police and military authorities. 

For we civilians, however, the kind of public grieving Spain is now displaying is the most powerful weapon we can wield; for these are the actions which allow us to immerse ourselves in a profound sadness, to grieve over the fate of the innocent and yet simultaneously, by those actions, declare that we, the community of decent human beings, are determined to persevere.