The 2020 Election and Fall Remembrances

By: John Bouman, November 11, 2020

As I write this, Joe Biden has won a clear victory over Donald Trump, but President Trump is refusing to acknowledge it. He is flouting traditions of gracious and unifying behavior by defeated candidates, making fact-free attacks on the quality of our democracy, delaying and undermining the peaceful and orderly transition of information and authority, threatening national security, and continuing to block effective response to the COVID 19 crisis. This is a time of tension, unique in many ways, but also with echoes of other tense moments of crisis we have encountered. Today is Veterans’ Day, when we rightly honor and thank and pay respect to all of our service members past and present. It is also an occasion that calls to mind another remembrance two months earlier in the calendar, 11/11 and 9/11.

My brother is a Lutheran clergyman who was the bishop for Lutheran churches in the New York area on 9/11/2001. On that fateful day, he had to worry about family in downtown Manhattan who were not immediately known to be safe. In the schools connected to the churches under his jurisdiction, a number of children, cared for by school staff, waited in vain that day to be picked up by parents who did not survive in the towers. Missing firemen and other responders were members of the churches. My brother’s job as bishop was to care for the caregivers, the pastors, principals, teachers, other professionals and lay leaders in his congregations. There were unthinkable funerals, breakdowns, a couple of suicides. There was a hot episode of teaching people to remember to love and help the Arab congregation in Brooklyn. During those times he sent raw and powerful emails to us, which were his outlet and his lifeline to keep his sanity, and documented his journey as a struggling faith leader through those trials. Working through his own stress and grief, he was also a beacon of hope and peace.

Because my brother felt compelled to continue to write on each year’s anniversary, a wide audience expected some sort of powerful message every 9/11. For many years it continued to be therapy, and he delivered. But in his September 2014 message he confessed some fatigue with it. He said in his email that he did what he always does on 9/11 — played Bruce Springsteen in the morning and then played the Brahms Requiem at night. The music did its healing, my brother said in his email, but he needed a postponement on the deep message. He said he thought he had more to say but it hadn’t surfaced yet. Stay tuned next year.

I forwarded my brother’s 2014 message — powerful in its own way — to my young adult children. I remarked on how hard it must be for their uncle to be under the gun every 9/11 to produce something for his audience that measures up to his original deep emotion and insight.

And then I reflected a bit about our own day on the original 9/11. I had gotten a call from my son’s high school to come pick him up. He was a freshman and had just started. They said he was sick. In the car he was no longer sick, as if re-connecting to his anchors and affirming their safety and continued performance as anchors had pulled him back from the dizzying abyss of those terrible TV images.

My son responded with his own account of that day. Back then, he wasn’t physically sick but he was emotionally unmoored. He needed to know we were all safe. He knew I worked near the Sears Tower (Chicago’s equivalent Twin Towers-type target). He needed to know all was going to be OK, but the normal jokes and wisecracks of high school kids dealing with fright and vertigo were not helping. He needed to be where things cohered.

Then he went on to say that he had since learned some perspective and context. He had become aware of and conscious of trying to understand that there are places in this world where 9/11 type things are not unusual. He spoke of the troubling facts that indicate our country’s complicity in some of those things. It was a long, thoughtful email.

In that same September 2014 email, I talked about World War I, because my daughter was spending that Fall in London as a student. That was also the year of the centennial of the start of that war in August 1914. There are common threads to those events.

Two months after 9/11 is November 11, Veterans Day. The original holiday was Armistice Day, meant to commemorate the day in 1918 that ended the killing phase of the massive upheaval that was World War I. It meant the end of empires and dynasties and hundreds of years of class, social, economic and political arrangements. It also started the “peace” process that sowed the seeds not only of World War II, but of decades of strife in the Middle East and the Balkans. One book about it is entitled, “The Peace to End All Peace” (by David Fromkin), which is a riff on the painfully naïve contemporary view that World War I was the “War to End All Wars.” (Indeed, the cascade of wars since then in part accounts for the change in the name of the holiday in order to recognize all veterans).

The start of that war in August 1914 was a colossal cock-up of governments not in control of their militaries. An important book on this is “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman, written around 1960. The great TV movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis pays homage to it in its title, “The Missiles of October”. In one crucial scene President Kennedy says he is reading “Tuchman’s book”, and he declares that he refuses to be like the political leaders of 1914 and become a helpless spectator to the military’s mobilization schedules.

In that email to the kids about my brother and 9/11, I linked that day’s sense of vertigo and crisis to the dislocations of World War I, and I told the kids about Armistice Day and recommended the Guns of August. I told my daughter about how profoundly traumatic WWI had been in Britain, essentially costing it the cream of a whole generation. I asked if she had encountered any events or evidence of the day in London. She said she hadn’t. I wrote back that they call it Remembrance Day, and that there was a huge show of 880,000 ceramic red poppies at the Tower of London, one for each death of a commonwealth soldier. And she wrote back, yes, sure enough, it’s called Remembrance Day, and she was going to try to go to the Tower show, and it indeed is a big deal in London. She later reported attending the exhibit and finding it deeply moving.

Why am I connecting these Fall remembrances of September 11 and November 11 to the election and the current uncertainties about whether we will have an orderly transition, especially in the context of years-old family correspondence?

The parallels in the three situations are not directly comparable, of course. But the resonances and lessons of the two disasters seem applicable to today’s unresolved leadership transition.

· My brother’s role during 9/11 was tremendously difficult, but it was also a role that the people he served deeply needed him to perform in order to find their anchors emotionally and act productively on their values and in unity. My son’s experience on 9/11 also speaks to the need for this reassurance in a crisis. Our currently stalled Presidential transition is depriving the country of that kind of leadership in the pandemic, which has been missing.

· My son’s insight was telling: we rightly remember a traumatic event on 9/11 that cost 5,000 lives and threatened our sense of security; but there are places in this world where this is not unusual, and in some of those places the U.S. is involved (for better or worse). The importance and sensitivity of the country’s positioning in the world is one of the matters hanging in the balance in America’s stalled leadership transition. The ability of the people to understand and support complex global actions depends heavily on responsible and effective leadership.

· My daughter’s exchange of emails about Remembrance Day was also telling. She paid attention to my little history lesson and learned something about the context of where she was studying and the world she lives in. Our top leaders are more likely to learn and consider similar context about the nations they deal with after the transition, and the sooner the better.

· The European leaders’ loss of control of events that led to the outbreak of World War I is a loud caution that our current unsettled and distracting leadership transition is a gap in our attention span that could result in one or more of the sensitive situations around the world getting away from our ability to control it. It is a time of opportunity for our enemies.

· Armistice Day ended the killing phase of World War I but led to a peace process that spawned endless rounds of additional violence still resonating in our world — including 9/11 and its progeny of Middle East warfare. The current stalled leadership transition in the US is fraught with these kinds of traps and potential for costly mistakes. The recent “go it alone” approach to foreign policy appears to have further complicated these risks, and the suspended animation of the transition process multiplies those risks.

· That President Kennedy was a reading man, and that his reading had taught him to avoid the mistakes that led to World War I in his handling and staring down of the Cuban Missile Crisis, speaks volumes to the need for a quick transition to this kind of leadership.

It is not at all clear that, in taking his turn at addressing the country’s challenges, President Trump has consulted history or listened to advisors who possess this context. It appears unlikely that, for example, he has informed his responses to the conflicts triggered by 9/11 with the lessons embedded in Veterans’ (Armistice) Day. It is laughable to suggest President Trump would consider, never mind learn from, a trip to see the poppies at the Tower, or a consultation of Tuchman, or a reading of anguished emails from participants during 9/11. And he has demonstrated quite clearly that he is unwilling or unable to lead in a crisis in a way that produces coherence, calm and unity. The delay and ambiguity about the transition therefore has echoes of the vertigo and danger of 9/11 and 11/11. A fitting Veterans’ Day gift to the veterans and the whole nation would be to get on with the orderly transition of power that lies at the core — indeed is the proof — of the democracy that veterans have fought and sacrificed for.