There is a separation between my life before September 11, 2001 and my life afterwards. I cannot say I became an adult that day, but I can say it was day 1 of my adult life. As a senior in high school, I remember parts of that day clearly. I came out of third period gym class and someone said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. In fourth period we watched the towers fall on live TV.

My church called all the congregants and we held an emergency meeting that night. It was a time of sharing, venting and praying. That night I heard the word Taliban for the first time. People were angry. There was an atmosphere of revenge in the air. I think that on September 12th an opportunity existed for humanity to make a radical change for the better, but it was not to be.

***

In the spring of 2003 I was in Texarkana, Texas during the opening days of the invasion of Iraq. The Christian college I was attending had arranged a ‘campaign’ (admittedly, an unfortunate choice of terminology) to go door-to-door handing out flyers inviting people to a gospel meeting. This gospel meeting was being held at the Texarkana fairgrounds, which normally showcases rodeos and livestock auctions. Four hot tubs had been brought in so that people wouldn’t have to wait in line to be baptized.

The invasion of Iraq was built upon the narrative that Sadaam Hussein was funding terrorists and had begun building nuclear weapons. This narrative was somewhat weaker than the one given for invading Afghanistan, which was that Osama Bin Laden had planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, and he was being supported by the Taliban who allowed him to operate from that region. Because the story for Iraq was not as concrete and the 9/11 attacks were not so fresh, there was considerable resistance to the decision to invade. However, even in 2003 there was still more than enough anger and fear left to move ahead with a second major military campaign.

At the time, myself and almost everyone I knew were totally swept up in the fervor of it. Those were the glory days of Jack Bauer of the tv show 24. We watched that show religiously. Every time Jack pushed the moral envelope, every suspected terrorist he tortured, we cheered him on.

Now the warm afterglow from these wars has long worn off. Hollywood made an absolute event out of it. For civilians, it’s difficult to think about that time period without conjuring up images from American Sniper, Billy Lynn’s, and The Hurt Locker. Though these movies acknowledged the realities of PTSD and what soldiers go through upon returning to the US, Hollywood was kind enough to portray it in a way that we could enjoy the “action” (pronounced: violence) and still stomach our popcorn.

Of course now these heroic images have also become mixed with other images that do not fit so neatly into a feature film. I’m not a foreign policy or middle east expert by any definition, but with a little thought it’s not hard to link the choices we made in the early 2000s with the images we see now: the disregarded veteran struggling to make ends meet for his family, the refugees, the war orphans, and the black-clad ISIL fighters standing in the back of a truck.

Of course ISIL and Bin Laden did us a favor with their physical appearance. Men dressed in black, with beards, speaking in a foreign language are the very picture of otherness. They fit easily into a narrative given to us since childhood.

***

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a kid is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. Bad guys were easy to spot because they looked like bad guys. They were either deformed (Darth Vader), mentally ill (Joker), disabled (Kraige), a minority or at the very least a non-native English speaker (every James Bond movie). They were utterly inhuman and left little room for relatability.

Bad guys’ motivations were easy to explain, they were evil for the sake of evil. They never changed: Darth Vader didn’t work out an arrangement to balance his questionable work life with family obligations, and Joker never received the loving support to help him with an obviously deep attachment issue. Because these bad guys were incapable of change and intently set on harming others for harm’s sake this left the hero with no option but to resolve the conflict through violence.

Conveniently, the villain's lack of relatability made it cognitively very easy to accept violence as a solution. After all, who was going to mourn the death of Darth Vader or the long-term incarceration of The Joker? These bad guys were outside of our community. Did Darth ever come and support you when a family member passed away? Was he at your side to celebrate your child’s first birthday? Was The Joker ever an integral part of our friend circle?

At that time we were just kids and therefore weren’t allowed to witness the close up or grisly demise of another person, regardless of their otherness. In America we have a rating system for movies and television: G, PG, PG-13 and R. Anything rated G was considered acceptable for ‘General Audiences’, PG meant ‘Parental Guidance suggested’, PG-13 indicated material that was best viewed by those above the age of 13 and R was for ‘adults’ (i.e. over 17).

This could be viewed as a system where the amount of violence is limited for those who are younger and gradually relaxed as a child gets older and is permitted to see increasingly realistic depictions of violence. However, viewed from a different angle, this rating system could be seen as a systematic education with students graduating to higher levels and greater amounts of violent acts. So called ‘Parental Guidance’ in most cases amounted to the following: “It’s just a movie.” And so as I grew up in the US, my young mind continued to consume more murders, gradually becoming more numb to the action.

But regardless of the rating, from G to R, the storylines stayed the same. Some people can’t be reasoned with, they are too far gone and must be eliminated for the good of us all. The good guys were good and always good, even their evil acts could be justified as necessary. We rarely were given the chance to gain insight into the bad guys. I can’t speak for people everywhere, but I know where I grew up we tended to watch the same shows, talk about the same topics and have similar worldviews. This narrative of redemptive violence and the otherness of our enemies had so saturated our minds that when September 11 came, there was no question as to what we would do.

In 2001 I was a senior in high school. I was 17 and could legally watch rated R movies. The twin towers came down, launching a global war on terror. It was graduation day.

The Narrative of Redemptive Violence