“What can we say about that in this moment?” Jordan asked National Immigration Forum president and CEO Ali Noorani.

Noorani, who is also the author of the new book Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants, began by acknowledging the inspirational global response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. “It’s like nothing I know I have ever seen in my lifetime,” he said. But he added that the warm response to the mass movement of people from and within Ukraine also makes the hypocrisy and racism of the current refugee resettling system—created after World War II—glaringly obvious.

“It’s really clear that the public”—who are helping Ukrainians settle into new homes and communities—“is much better than the governments who are administering refugee resettlement systems,” said Noorani.

This was a reoccurring theme throughout the discussion: that people at a local level are better equipped to think and talk about immigration than their leaders—and the best way to unite people around immigration is to act on a community level.

But on a national scale, Noorani said, we need global leadership to come together to build a new international refugee system that makes it possible for anyone to get to a safe place.

One step toward a new system is depolarizing the immigration narrative. Over the past few years, amid the Syrian refugee crisis, politicians on the right have been wielding fear and insecurity as a weapon to close borders and stigmatize immigrants. In response, Noorani and his colleagues at the National Immigration Forum have been working across the aisle with a few different conservative groups, including white evangelicals, in efforts to find common ground.

They have been trying to “understand how evangelicals are seeing immigrants and immigration, what their fears are, and what their aspirations are,” said Noorani. He and his team worked with one group of evangelical women who were “skeptical of the way the Trump administration was treating immigrants, but they didn’t have another way of thinking about it,” he said. After discussing immigration from both a policy and biblical perspective, the group eventually took a trip to Oaxaca, where the evangelical women met with migrant mothers trying to find protection in the U.S.

Jordan asked if these kinds of interactions give Noorani “reason to believe that it’s possible to have a civil conversation around immigration?”

Yes, said Noorani. “It’s not because all Americans believe that we’re a nation of immigrants.” Rather, “people are seeing that their community is a community of immigrants.” He elaborated on that statement in response to an audience question submitted via YouTube chat about responding to the fear certain Republicans foment about immigrants. Creating conversations that push back happens via people’s “in-groups,” said Noorani—their family and friends, faith groups, local law enforcement officials, and local community and business leaders.

The immigration fears that Noorani and his colleagues see come up most often revolve around “culture, security, and the economy,” he said. “If we can acknowledge those fears and then create ways so that they’re not just answered, but that people are also invited into opportunities to think and act differently when it comes to immigration, then you start to move the needle,” he said. “Too often in our politics, we don’t acknowledge those fears. We dismiss them outright, and then we keep moving.” Such dismissal or diminishing of fears can make it difficult to create consensus.

Noorani’s new book, out next week, contains stories from around the U.S. and the world, in part because he wants to take the discussion around immigration out of a strictly policy framework. Instead, he hopes to take “the realities that were being lived” in communities and “connect those to the politics and the policies that in so many ways make this debate not just complicated but really, really ugly.”

Nonetheless, a number of audience members in the online chat asked him how to convince Congress to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.

Before 9/11 and “the hardening” of the U.S.-Mexico border, there was a great deal of “circular migration” between the nations, said Noorani. For example, workers would leave Oaxaca, work eight months in construction or agriculture in the U.S., then return home. “Frankly, it worked,” said Noorani. Restrictions at the border today make such movement impossible, leaving undocumented immigrants stranded in the U.S. for years. Returning to a circular system would ease a lot of pressure at the border, said Noorani.

It would also undermine a major business for cartels. “We have outsourced nearly the entirety of our immigration system to the cartels. They are making billions of dollars just on the movement of people,” he said. In response to another audience question about how the U.S. is collaborating with Central American nations on immigration issues, Noorani said that the closing of most official immigration channels has forced desperate people to turn to unofficial channels. “The problem is not the migrant leaving Central America. The problem is really the cartel that has monetized that journey,” said Noorani. What if, instead of paying a cartel $10,000 for a visa, a migrant could pay the U.S. government $10,000 for a visa? “We have to work really hard to reframe the public’s understanding of what the problem is,” said Noorani.

The post To Solve America’s Immigration Woes, We Need to Think, Act, and Work Locally appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A very few have been identified. Italian doctors managed to match a photograph of a young, smiling Eritrean woman dressed in colorful clothes with the teeth of an anonymous corpse, its face frozen in the grin of rigor mortis. This body got back its name and re-entered the order of humanity.

Naming the dead is a great antidote to anonymity and a testament to belonging: Very quickly after the last terrorist attack on American soil—in San Bernardino, California—we got media reports listing the 14 people killed; we’ve built important public memorials in the last 50 years comprised of great assemblages of the names of the dead. Two thousand nine hundred and forty-two of them are at the heart of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. They are organized into nine broad categories—those who worked in Tower 1, first responders, crew and passengers of United Airlines Flight 175, for example—and within each category by more refined classifications—those who worked together, first responders from a particular agency, the crew of Flight 175. Next of kin were allowed to suggest the proximity of particular names, so that close friends and colleagues could be closer to one another here, too. These naming practices restore the dead to the places they once held in the social world of the living.

Resting beneath the great panels of names are the remains of 1,115 unidentified bodies; 7,930 plastic envelopes of unidentified bone fragments joined them in 2014. The names of the dead are thus as near to the bodies they have lost as forensic science and aesthetic ingenuity allow.

Maya Lin’s stunning Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. is, of course, centrally about names. These are organized chronologically into the deathly contours of the unfolding of war; the wall is at its tallest for the period of greatest numbers of fatalities. Visitors see themselves reflected in the names; they trace names on paper; they leave gifts and notes in front of particular panels for the person remembered by an inscribed name. The exact locations of the bodily remains of most of these names are known, but 1,626 of the names on the black shiny marble wall represent bodies that are lost—disappeared. The only trace of their existence is the inscriptions of their names on this memorial.

This sort of recuperative attention to the names of the dead is found not only in great public places. It informs smaller and more intimate settings. Woody Guthrie’s last great protest song, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” for example, is about the 28 unnamed Mexican workers who went down in flames in Los Gatos Canyon, near Coalinga, in 1948:

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

The names of the pilot and security guards on this tragic flight were printed in The New York Times and other papers; the 28 Mexicans were buried anonymously. These dead, seen as beneath notice, were buried anonymously in a mass grave—“Mexican Nationals 1–28”—in a nearby Catholic cemetery. Sixty years later, through the efforts of the poet and performer Tim Hernandez and an aged cemetery worker, their names were recovered. A proper memorial was built. The site became a place around which the dead hovered: “Abuelo, Tio, estoy aquí” (Grandfather, Uncle, I am here). The nameless had a resting place: “Mi’jo, I can go in peace now that I know where my brother was buried.”

In 2013, Hernandez and the Fresno musician Lance Canales recorded a new version of “Deportee” in which the individuals’ names are all sung.

There have been many such efforts to name the dead in the last few decades, large and small. Advocates for the anonymous dead buried in a potter’s field on New York City’s Hart Island have recovered 63,694 names, out of nearly 1 million nameless bodies that have been buried there since 1868. This past summer, as a result of the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, relatives of those who think they have kin on the island gained the right to visit and mourn. From 2003 to 2007, Castro Valley police and community groups spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to discover the name of an anonymous Latina found dead on the city’s streets. They succeeded; the body was returned to her family in Mexico.

Our interest in commemorating the dead through the recovery of their names dates back to the 19th century: Before then, soldiers were usually buried anonymously where they fell, and even many private graves were only minimally marked. The American Civil War was a turning point. A great web of emotion—letters, poems, and novels—made the anonymous death of soldiers unacceptable in both the public and private spheres. Gettysburg was the first national cemetery in the modern world and was modeled on the one on the site of the Battle of Marathon—where the Athenian soldiers who died defeating the city’s great Persian enemy are buried.

But World War I was an even more decisive moment. The period after the war witnessed the creation of many naming monuments, the largest of which at Thiepval listed 72,195 British soldiers who died in the Battle of the Somme and whose bodies were either nameless—the unknowns—or lost—disappeared into the muck. Starting in the early 1920s, Britain, France, the United States, and other countries erected tombs of an “Unknown Soldier,” a body that in its eternal anonymity represented all such bodies. These memorials became hallowed ground.

An easy answer to why individual names have become so much a part of our commemorative culture is the rise of democracy: Every one of us deserves individual remembrance. True enough, but it only gets us so far. More important is the claim, made by more and more groups—descendants of slaves and migrants, families of ordinary office workers and common soldiers—that their dead, too, had lives worth noting and have a right to public recognition, to a place among the living. If the 19th century was the great age of the monument to civic worthies, the 20th is the age of the universal right to a name worth remembering. The state that had conscripted millions of young men to die for its sake recorded their names as evidence of national belonging and sacrifice. But more importantly, beginning with the Civil War, ordinary people began to feel that each and every life has a claim to a denouement—to a known and knowable death.

The post Why We Need to Name the Dead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My own JFK moment came 14 years ago this month on a loading dock in Long Beach. I backed my step van into the dock in the Cintas plant on that city’s east side, and then marked the grill pads, shop towels, mops, runners, and three-by-five and four-by-six mats on my inventory list before loading the items in order of the day’s deliveries. I was on a knee re-rolling mats when another driver stormed in and announced what had happened. A plane had just smashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. We were incredulous.

But we also had our jobs to do and our rounds to make, so I got back into the van and started to drive. In those days, I was the guy who took your dirty dust mops and soiled mop heads and gave you clean ones in return. I replaced the old air freshener pucks and checked the soap dispensers in public restrooms. I also delivered grill pads and wrap-around waist aprons to restaurant cooks or cocineros. I serviced businesses throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties, but most of my stops were in Long Beach.

I can remember every stop from that morning, framed by the news I heard on the radio. As I drove, I learned of the second tower being hit, a third plane crashing into the Pentagon, and a fourth plane, intended for who knows where, crashing in a field. I was sad and disbelieving, and so were the people on my route. We were in this together. That reassured me. My customers were of all ages and backgrounds, and they reacted calmly and thoughtfully. I remember the crestfallen faces and a lot of Oh-My-Gods. Everyone talked about the people who died – in the trade center, on the planes. They put themselves in their shoes.

I have fond memories of all my customers. Even the one who, on that very day, bad-mouthed his fellow Americans.

He stood in front of the mounted TV on the wall of his fish market and said they got what they deserved. They? The victims, he said. He kept staring up at the screen and mocking those who perished.

I freaked. Maybe some had cheated on their taxes, coveted their neighbors’ goods, and lied to their bosses, wives, and husbands. But to say death was well deserved was beyond offensive. I wanted to confront him, maybe sock him in the mouth. It wouldn’t have been out of character for me then.

But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped off the dishtowels, the aprons, and exchanged his dirty dust and wet mops for clean ones. That day I serviced the customer sans a smile and issued a receipt. I went back out to my van, still seething.

But then I found myself recalling the time I was stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I befriended a number of my fellow soldiers. One of those in my Army platoon was a soccer-loving troop named Bacary Sambou, born in Senegal. He was a good soldier and a practicing Muslim. He observed Ramadan, faced Mecca when he prayed, and planned on making a hajj, a pilgrimage to the site of the Kaaba, the holy shrine said to have been erected by Ishmael’s father, Abraham, in Mecca. He often wore a cap called a kufi. The dude in the fish store that day wore a kufi also, but it was a different color. I don’t know for sure if the latter was a Muslim like my battle buddy, but the thought crossed my mind.

I’m not saying that I didn’t fight the man in the store because he wore a cap similar to the one Sambou wore. But I am saying that the cap invoked a memory of Sambou that made me feel ashamed of my anger about the fish-store owner’s words.

If I hated dude from the fish store, I’d be like the soldier who shared a room with Sambou. It upset me that the roommate, a holier-than-thou type, complained that Sambou washed his feet in the sink instead of the tub and ridiculed him for his religious beliefs. Sambou didn’t trip. He knew his roommate’s comments were made in ignorance. People say things in ignorance all the time. I’m guilty of it, too. So was the owner of the fish market.

Sambou always found the strength to turn the other cheek.

The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that I was wrong for hating both the roommate and the dude at the fish store. People are going to do and say things that ruffle our tail feathers all the time. Period. They had a right not to empathize, not to mourn.

My routine after servicing the fish market was to browse the funk section at V.I.P. Records on Pacific Coast Highway and Martin Luther King Boulevard (a store that is, sadly, no longer there). But on that afternoon, I drove the van straight back to the plant, and decided to call it a day. Part of me still was angry, and I can remember thinking that I could crash a plane into the fish store. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Hammurabi’s stele says.

But, as we know all too well now, after 14 years of war, that’s how trouble starts. How about turning the other cheek once in a while?

Turning the other cheek means not attacking your neighbor for minor offenses. It also means not wishing the annihilation of people on the other side of the world, even for major offenses. Uncle Sam was slapped hard in the face that day. So was I. But rather than retaliating, maybe it’s best to keep driving, head home, and try to understand.

That dude from the fish store wasn’t one of the hijackers. He wasn’t responsible for staining the U.S.A’s social fabric with blood on September 11, 2001. It’s possible that stain is here to stay. But the stain the fishmonger left can be wiped away, forgotten, overcome.

The post Lessons From a Fishmonger While the Twin Towers Fell appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As an urban planner and architect (before becoming a professor, I was an architect at SOM-Chicago), I know safety is more critical in tall buildings than in low-rise structures because tall buildings host a greater number of inhabitants and are themselves expensive investments. I also know that, if appropriately designed and built, skyscrapers are safer in many respects than low-rise and mid-rise buildings. They have concrete cores that are robust and designed to withstand the extreme lateral forces and loads that occur during high winds and earthquakes. Fire safety systems in skyscrapers include sprinklers and wet and dry standpipes to which firefighting hoses can be connected. Multiple escape routes, fire stairs, and refuge floors allow office-building workers to escape the most intense parts of the blazes or head outside.

Serious concerns about the issue of safety in tall buildings came to a head following the World Trade Center collapse in 2001. Researchers and professionals of many disciplines came to the conclusion that the codes then for tall buildings were inadequate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researched the World Trade Center’s collapse and came to a greater appreciation of safety measures when it estimated how many people would have died if the two buildings were fully occupied. They concluded it would have taken more than three hours to evacuate the buildings fully, and in the process, 14,000 people–28 percent of the occupants–would have died because of insufficient stairwell capacity.

NIST stressed that time is of the essence in evacuation. And helipads have a very small impact on evacuation times. Helicopters take time to land, load people, and take off. They only take a small number of a skyscraper’s occupants at a time. Further, helicopter pilots are often extremely hesitant to land on a burning building, fearing that the helicopter may catch fire as blazes and smoke swiftly ascend. Even if a pilot decides to take a risk and land on the rooftop, the rising heat and smoke from the fire may jostle and destabilize the helicopter, complicating the landing process and preventing people from boarding the helicopter. Research indicated that if the World Trade Center rooftops had been accessible (the helipad fell into disuse), helicopters couldn’t have landed because of the heat and smoke.

Our rarely used helipads may enhance the perception of safety, but they have a limited role to play. Therefore, increasing a tall building’s safety by design–the building prevents the spread of fire and allows people to exit quickly through protected routes–is a “smarter” strategy than relying on a helipad.

How to create such a strategy? The NIST study came up with recommendations to guide us:

Assume that the full building will evacuate. Conventionally, builders of high-rises have assumed “staged evacuations” will occur. During a fire on one floor, occupants were supposed to evacuate to adjacent floors until it was safe to return. Exit paths traditionally accommodated three to five floors evacuating simultaneously. After the World Trade Center collapse, it became clear that a tall building’s occupants would likely want to evacuate all at once in an emergency situation. NIST recommends that all non-residential skyscrapers that exceed 420 feet in height have three stairwells and fireproofing capable of withstanding a pressure of 1,000 pounds per square foot (in the event of a bomb, chemical interaction, gas breakout, or something similar).

Allow some office workers to use elevators in an emergency. Conventionally, in an emergency situation, elevators in high-rise buildings are used by firefighters only. NIST recommends building elevators that can withstand fires and structural damage in the concrete core of a building, and that allow firefighters to stop at each floor to evacuate tenants who have trouble walking.

Mark stairwells and exits with glow-in-the-dark signs. As simple as it sounds, not every building has such markings, especially those built before the 2000s. New York was the first large city to require luminous markings in stairwells, five years after the tragic events of 9/11. More than 1,500 buildings now have the markings, but that’s still a small fraction of America’s tall buildings.

If a city adopts these recommendations–and also asks tall buildings to include refuge floors, video-camera surveillance, and automatic sprinkler systems–the safety of the skyscrapers will increase significantly, and the need for a helipad will diminish. L.A., as it eliminates the helipad requirement, should embrace as many NIST standards and fire-safety codes and recommendations as possible. Stricter requirements should be imposed on taller structures. The crux: New tall buildings should ensure the safety of occupants and not rely on external assistance to rescue people in case of emergency. It’s worth noting that some new features will enhance office workers’ daily lives, making it easier to get up and down buildings in general.

Relaxing the requirements of a helipad also will empower architects to create more interesting rooftops that will better reflect the imaginative nature and spirit of Los Angeles. A space 50-by-50-feet wide at minimum is required for a helipad spot, plus a typical additional 25 feet around it as a buffer. This has resulted in a repetitive, boxy roof shape in the Los Angeles skyline.

The helipad’s power to limit designs for rooftops was apparent in the 3,300-foot-tall (1-kilometer-tall) Kingdom Tower currently under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A protruding helipad was proposed toward the top of the pointy tower. However, helicopter pilots pointed out that they would not feel comfortable landing there because they feared tight space and potentially high winds could cause them to hit the tower. The proposed 7,500-square-foot helipad was converted to an outdoor balcony instead, known as the “sky terrace” that will overlook the Red Sea.

Of course, there are examples of good helipad design. Dubai’s Burj Al Arab (which is 1,053 feet high) has a helipad about 689 feet up that provides good access for helicopters because it’s projected, and the air is away from the building’s perimeters. It also doubles as a tennis court; in 2005, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer squared off there.

Beyond aesthetics, boxy rooftops with helipads are really a missed opportunity to create “green” roofs with sustainable features. Now Los Angeles can do something like the spiral form in the rooftop of Shanghai Tower in Shanghai that captures rainwater. Some towers’ tops are now designated for wind turbines to harness wind energy, such as the Strata Tower in London. Other towers, like the Wuhan Center in China, are shaped aerodynamically to reduce the stress winds put on a building, and reduce construction costs. Some towers, like the Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China, embrace forms that decrease wind loads and harness wind energy simultaneously.

There’s nothing to fear–and much to gain–in relaxing the helipad requirement. I, for one, will be watching to see what inventive skyscrapers Angelenos come up with.

The post L.A.’s Shifting Skyline Will Be More Spiraling, Imaginative—and Safer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On what turned out to be the last afternoon of his life, Levin was enthusiastically guiding me around John F. Kennedy Airport’s renowned Terminal 5, the modernist, curvy masterpiece Eero Saarinen designed for TWA. By 2001, Terminal 5 stood as a quaintly-sized monument to a more glamorous age of air travel. Airport authorities wanted to preserve the structure but build a larger facility around it; historic preservationists, still haunted by the demolition of the old Penn Station, wanted the Port Authority to keep using the former TWA facility, unmodified. Levin’s mission that day was to convince me and my fellow New York Times editorial writer Verlyn Klinkenborg that these preservationists were not being reasonable.

It all made for an interesting, and rare, Monday afternoon field trip. Not once did we ask anything about security. Why would we? It was 9/10.

My two most surreal memories of the day that followed – bookends to the nightmare, really – are set in Times Square.

Upon first hearing the confused news reports that morning, I scrambled from my place uptown to make it into the Times building and found myself crossing Times Square at the moment the first tower collapsed. Standing with me was an impressive cross-section of humanity – French tourists, Middle Eastern breakfast-truck operators, pretty Condé Nast girls, swarms of salaried white-collar workers for whom work no longer mattered, sailors on shore leave, street performers – looking up at the jumbo screen attached to the ABC/Good Morning America facility, with the unflappable Peter Jennings manning his desk to host what seemed like the end of the world.

As the tower collapsed, the entire lower portion of our city (where my wife and countless friends worked) vanished from sight in a mushroom cloud. On Times Square, the multitude of former strangers (there is no such thing on a day like that) didn’t scream; it was more like one collective gasp emanating from thousands simultaneously punched in the gut. I recall a feeling of watching myself watch all this, almost like an extra in one of those Hollywood apocalyptic flicks where New York gets wiped out before the good, God-fearing folks in the rest of the country prevail against the aliens/natural disaster/bad guys.

I spent the next 14 hours scrambling with colleagues at the Times to make sense of the day (my wife did reach me around noon, alive and well), an exercise which seemed both essential and pointless. Did New Yorkers really need to wait for the Times editorial page to let them know what to make of that day? Kudos to Verlyn, though, for writing the pitch-perfect opening sentence to the lead editorial published on 9/12: “Remember the ordinary, if you can.”

I was still stuck on airport duty, though no longer on terminal aesthetics. I was cramming to learn everything there was to learn about airport security and unheeded warnings. The entire aviation system was grounded, would be for days, and the debate about what it would take for planes to fly again – and for a return to normalcy, more broadly speaking – was only starting.

Ten years on, it’s hard to remember – even for those of us who lived in New York – just how shell-shocked we were, and just how different everything did feel, for a time. There was the smell, for one thing. People describe it in different ways, but to me the city smelt of burnt plastic for weeks. And then there was the sense of solidarity, akin to what you read about in London during the Blitz. New Yorkers were suddenly, exaggeratedly, considerate towards each other, in the street, in the subway, at their workplaces.

What’s more, we all wanted to huddle together, all the time. My memories of those days and weeks are of crammed bars, restaurants and cafés, TVs blaring the latest news as if tuned to the World Series. No one wanted to go home, because that would mean having to absorb all this alone.

If there were a Geiger counter to measure social cohesion in those days, the needle would have been stuck at the height of the scale. We were one. For the moment, there was no room for partisanship or race or class or creed. It was – dare I say it? – beautiful.

In that moment, you may recall, there was talk about how there was no going back to 9/10, about how we would no longer be a frivolous, petty society-as if the attacks had been a punishment meted out by deities upset by our sudden devotion to reality TV shows. Writing in Time shortly after the attacks, Roger Rosenblatt noted, “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony,” the period when America’s chattering classes had refused to take anything seriously.

Reed Johnson captured the zeitgeist in a Los Angeles Times story published 12 days after the attack in which he quoted Jedediah Purdy, the brilliant young author of a book assailing irony (and then a fellow at my current employer, the New America Foundation), as saying it was “amazing to see how in these past few days we – who have been so used to living with our selves front and center – are suddenly all aware that a common condition comes first. We have not been flip, self-involved, needlessly sarcastic or focused on small divisions. We have been working for ways to help. All of us. That is new to us.”

It is hard in retrospect to track the erosion of this exceptional moment of solidarity and purpose. It wasn’t bound to last forever, of course, and the ensuing revelations of fraud on Wall Street and at companies like Enron and the debacle of the Iraq war left many Americans justifiably embittered. We also began to see that the so-called War on Terror would not, after all, require a massive mobilization of society a la WWII.

We have since returned to petty self-indulgence – be it in our pop culture or in our hyper-partisan politics – with a vengeance. Oh, and when we fly, we grumble at having to take our shoes off at security. In short, to cite Verlyn again, we did a pretty good job of remembering the ordinary.

Still, thank God for that. The spirit of 9/12 and the ensuing weeks might have been beautiful, but it was not our natural state, either as Americans or humans, and it’s too horrifying to contemplate what it would have taken to keep us in such a state of empathetic solidarity for long. Who we were on 9/10 is who we are today, and who we were on 9/12 is almost impossible to reconstruct in our own minds.

But back to the day itself, and my second surreal memory of Times Square. It was late at night as I crossed Broadway again, and, this time, for the only time in my life, I had all of Times Square to myself. No tourists were milling about; no theater-goers; no late-night revelers; no harried lawyers or accountants rushing to catch their train home. The iconic heart of the city was deserted.

Only when I walked up to 45th Street did I realize there was another human out and about, an enterprising immigrant who’d set up a display of touristy pictures to hawk to non-existent pedestrians. They were watercolors of the Twin Towers.

“I am usually located in Battery Park,” he offered by way of an explanation, if not an apology. I reflexively bought one–would even have bought two if he’d taken a credit card (that negotiation must have been my first “normal” exchange of the day), so desperate was I to preserve the image. Maybe even the moment.

Andrés Martinez is Editorial Director of Zócalo Public Square and Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of fastfocus.

The post The Triumph of 9/10 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

‘Twas a scene serene last Sunday eve, especially at our house. DefCon Zero. Wife and I contentedly closing out a busy weekend toddling. Even little Atticus went down without incident. Win, Win, Win. The height of drama? 60 Minutes. I’m older than I think.

Halfway in, likely over a Flomax ad, the house phone unexpectedly rings – that’s rare. Only immediate family has the number, and they all know better than to dial it when a high degree of probability says a certain baby boy may be slumbering nearby. “Cell baby cell!” I’ll politely remind them. Tomorrow. When I retrieve the message. For now, they can wait. Let freedom ring.

Few seconds pass, resuming telepharma fogey hour programming. A text message enlightens my Mephone. Connected? … Probably nothing. It’s Sunday us time, check it later. Let go, be present.

Pause. Relax. My phone abruptly lurches in urgent vibration. And my heart starts to race. Something going on? Then another text pops up all expectant, followed immediately by another. Best dial in stat. Tap-tap. Another!  Battle stations. Cell now pounding in vibrastic seizure, staccato text volleys sparkling for attention. Status? All right. Concerned. Something is definitely up. Pleading please please please, don’t be bad.

Spot check. Idoya? Ten-hut by my side. Little one? Monitor read – positive ID, sleeping peacefully. Principals copacetic. Continue. Basset hound Humphrey lain out unresponsive on floor. Standard. All key hands and paws accounted for and secure. Probably little different from any other young, young, parent.

Not Dad. That was the party I feared for the first time these alerts went viral. And Jesus, don’t let it be my sister either, don’t think I could handle that, having gotten this far. Agreed? These are my demands. Wallens family circle of trust remains intact, and we’re good. Remember, you owe us one. Bargain.

First text to turn my insides out is from a mythically mirthy Irish buddy stationed in London, phew. Relief. His headline opens by calling me “Brother.” Which could mean he’s especially mirthy, or that something wicked this way comes. Quickly, what friends do we share? Few. Proceed.

London goes on to “Offer condolences.” Standby, hold please. What is going on here? And why wasn’t I notified?

Second text hails Mary fulla grace – it’s from my sister. Thank God. But by my frenzied calculus, this could also be bad, for if it’s Nicole, then this alleged happening, whatever it may be, has officially degenerated into something personal.

All of this races through my mind at synaptic speed, faster than eye can read.
But a while later, tunnel vision catches up, I read her words, and my knees get shaky. “OMG – TURN TO CNN”.

Shheeyyiiii… I guess it’s on. Again… Well, can’t possibly be worse than the last time. Deep breath, 1, 2, 3… Maintain control. Check for intel, dive in, survey situation. Here it is, banner headline. “Osama bin Laden Killed by US Special Forces.” Clear!

And Atticus slept sweetly through it all.

How long’d it take to read this far? Two, three minutes? Took 10 seconds to happen. Nine and three-quarters years to write. Just my personal smartphone era strain of post-traumatic stress, induced by 24-hour breaking news cycle. Many of us share this affliction. I come by my case personally. The big one.

My brother Blake was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, North Tower, 105th floor, Cantor Fitzgerald, you know the rest. Dashing titans of high finance, among the unlikeliest victims, whose targeting started the global conflagration. Instantly immolated, slaughtered en masse, by millennialist jihadis, in the quantum leap salvo, that launched an endless war. So began our nation’s hunt.

Blake was my closest friend, confidante, supporter. I stood as best man at his wedding; he was conscripted to serve as same in mine. Blake led from the front. Two years my elder, he was wiser than that. I trailed Blake’s legend through high school, and followed his star to college. He was blessed with a graceful irrepress not even a stilted New Yorker could resist. Smart, charming, handsome, connected. How he loved children, and they adored him. But Blake was himself no child of privilege. He displayed elegant intensity. One friend labeled Blake “Five-Star Supernova”. And it stuck. Blake avidly spread his contagious passion for the art of living; one revered motto urging concisely, “Think Story.” He coupled a prodigious ability to forge sacred friendships with a genuinely inquisitive, highly tuned mind.

Since the evildoers’ objective was to strike at the heart of American industry, Blake and his winsome cohort on Wall Street were most assuredly it. Blake had no truck with zealots. But ya’ try not to take it personal. Mortally wrong place, historically wrong time. Last lottery anybody oughta aspire to. And my closest ally protector was caught up in it. With a worldwide blast, witnessed by billions, his 30-year soaring success story turned into a short-lived tragedy.

Aftermath. Morning after, worst part? The dull blade gnawing curiosity. What were Blake’s last thoughts? What fear and bewilderment Blake scrambled to understand in his final moments. He died alone, scared, and no doubt reproaching himself for his lovely wife Raina. At the fix he found himself, and the break he’d leave her with.

In Los Angeles, Sept. 11 is regarded with just slightly greater awe than a box office blockbuster. Here, people’s perceptions of the world around us and events within it seem to spring less from perspective reality than from our ancestral love of movies. Where you better believe it, we absolutely always get our man. Or simply re-shoot the ending. So in the sensory deprivation chamber that is L.A., I, we, tend to feel a bit alone with this pain.

Had I one regret above all else about that dark day, strangely it’s that I had turned down a job offer that would’ve put me right there in the middle of it. Cantor offered me a few years prior; Blake even sweetened the deal by insisting he’d buy me the apartment next door.

But for the first time, I declined to follow, inexplicably, regrettably. I sorely wanted to be in that building that morning, to sacrifice my life to be by my brother’s side. But it wouldn’t have been fair to Dad.

We have all by now genuflected, then lamented, the non-partisanship that flowered in the days following Sept. 11. The circumstantial cohesion briefly flickered then died. People everywhere tried to help a brother out. To perform that eminently American miracle, turning defeat into a happy ending, by the third reel.

Those were the days, weeks, months when survivors each struggled to find peace, closure. But the attacks left most Americans enraged, violated. Not so much sad or heartbroken. And bin Laden’s deft evasion left us feeling outsmarted and impotent.

The years of fruitless search for the cave-dwelling megalomaniac who composed it all left Americans with a shared feeling of resignation.  Even cheerleader and “Chief Bringemon” George W. Bush conceded like some hapless breakup victim that Osama bin Laden was no longer even on his radar. He’d, uh, moved on.

So how do I feel about the death of Osama bin Laden? Less than you’d think, but more than I’d have thought. What’s a guy to do?  Summon all the family to a sentimentalist revival, cause our soldiers killed a guy? I don’t think so. We’ve come a long way back, and not on account of no figurehead. It’s not as if we were waiting baited all this time for bin Laden’s guts on a slab. We weren’t. The wish was incidental to the loss.

Like others who lost loved ones that dreadful day, I remain sad. No surprise there. But a couple of thoughts may surprise you. Angry?  A little, but again, less than you’d think. The hatred, avenger’s zeal? All pale next to that excruciating sad. The loss fractured my world, and those of unimaginably many others. Why, just think of the dimensions of your social network – how many Facebook friends ya’ got? Now multiply by 3,000. That’s about how many lives were similarly affected.

Make no mistake, I’m glad this murderous scourge has been surgically extracted from the human race. I’m glad he was discovered in a mansion. I relish how that fact exposes the fraud that he was. Bin Laden stridently cultivated an image of voluntary sacrifice. That this privileged scion of means chose to suffer in squalor side-by-side with his brothers. He didn’t; he was a fraud. The man was neither of his people, by them, nor for anyone else’s agenda but his own vainglory. Paid for with their death. Even his misguided followers must now concede that.

Alright, truth be told, yah, I’m glad the last thing bin Laden ever laid eyes on was the barrel end of elite American enforcement. To have known Blake and me was to know that two of our close friends serve in the Special Forces. We always shared great admiration for the code they live by, the excellence they pursue, the stories they share, the lives they sacrifice, for people they’ll never meet, who will never know their names. Honor.

When asked if I get “closure” from bin Laden’s demise, I struggle to answer so succinctly. “No,” I answer, “I hoped they’d send bin Laden’s bulleted carcass on a coast-to-coast decomposition tour. I could see his soulless body paraded around like it’s Weekend at Bernie’s.” Good thing cooler heads prevailed; I wouldn’t have been as respectful as the commander-in-chief.

Among those of us whose loss that day was final, we do not derive much “closure” from this development, because for us the closest thing to closure we ever got was a funeral. There is no moving on for us. Blake is still gone. We will never again meet, hug, laugh, cry, confide. My child will never meet his hero Uncle Blake.

The whole issue of closure means everything to others and trivia to us. To those who were stung by the attacks, but not necessarily struck by it, bin Laden’s death finally gives them their pride of settlement, of control, of eye-for-eye justice. Even Jesus be cool with that.

Well we the people, we got our man. We retook control and showed ‘em who’s boss.  I suppose that passes for “closure.” ‘Twas the one thing we all ever really wanted, and the only thing I’ll never ever get.

Jordan Wallens is author of Gridchronic. He works for an investment firm and lives in Los Feliz with his wife Idoya, son Atticus and basset hound Humphrey.

*Photo courtesy of Jordan Wallens.

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When planes struck the Twin Towers in 2001, John Fabian Witt–author, historian, and Yale Law School Professor–found his thoughts turning to history and the laws of war.

“All of the policies that have happened since 9/11 have happened inside the American tradition. Even in the furthest excesses of the Bush administration, it wasn’t that far off,” Witt stated in response to a question about acts of war versus criminal acts. “The idea of moving a conflict outside of the US is as old as the US.”

However, as a historian, Witt prefers to focus less on contemporary affairs and more on the origins of some of the questions with which we’re grappling today. This has prompted him to look into the legal contributions of US Army General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War in the 1840s. “My historian’s training makes me want to say, let’s talk about the 19th century,” he said.

The Mexican War and The Rise of Guerilla Tactics

The Mexican War fundamentally changed the laws of war, according to Witt. Having fought non-traditional wars with Indians, many officers hoped that war with Mexico would “at last be the opportunity to fight traditional European-style warfare,” with graces such as truce flags and prisoner exchanges.

But those hopes were quickly dashed. By 1847, any rules were quickly being abandoned. This was partly because of how Americans viewed Mexicans and partly because the volunteer U.S. Army of the 1840s was prone to riotous, delinquent behavior. (Even General Zachary Taylor, who would later become a  U.S. president, lamented that many members of the volunteer army were thieves and cowards.)

In early 1847, Mexican President Pedro María de Anaya called for guerilla tactics to disrupt American operations. “For the volunteer army, this caused outrage to no end,” Witt said. They started to engage in retaliatory acts. In particular, groups like the Texas Rangers and the Arkansas Militia started round up and kill Mexican boys.

Winfield Scott Saves the Day

“Winfield Scott was the very best General they could have sent into the situation,” Witt said, calling Scott the David Petraeus of his time. Scott was originally a lawyer. He had fought in the Indian wars, observed European military operations, and even created a drill manual.

Scott arrived in Mexico in 1847 and witnessed growing disorder. He realized that what he had on his hands was “a discipline deficit,” because the military didn’t have the authority to prosecute its soldiers internationally.

One story illustrated this phenomenon.

In late 1846, General Taylor wrote to President James Polk with a question: A volunteer had committed a crime after the war had ended. What could be done? Taylor was told to send the suspect home unpunished, because neither Taylor nor state courts had any authority to engage in prosecution. Scott found this hamstringing explanation intolerable.

Finally, Scott asked for an extension of the court martial jurisdiction, and Congress gave Polk the authority to prosecute. This led to the creation of General Order Number 20,  which established “military commissions” as a solution to the twin problems of US depredations in Mexico and of guerilla warfare. The institution of this led to over 300 prosecutions for rape, murder, desecration of churches and other crimes.

Witt described the councils of war as “mysterious and ephemeral.” Scholars have been unable to find transcripts of the prosecutions of guerillas, “but there were a number of them,” Witt says, as evidenced by anecdotes and memoirs.

The Ends and the Means, Machiavelli Style

The 1840s proved to be a pivotal moment in legal developments relating to warfare. Centuries earlier, St. Augustine had established the “just war” theory, which held until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, when people realized the problem with a “just war” was that “everyone was convinced their side was just,” Witt quipped.

The only way to create constraints on the practices of war was to get the contending armies to restrain themselves and create some “brackets” or codes of understanding.

“That decision to bracket justice for humanitarian purposes is what underwrites Prisoner of War status,” Witt explained. The P.O.W. is not a criminal; he is acting under an enemy king. Your acts aren’t necessarily crimes if you are just following orders of the state.

The “reciprocity explanation” creates a humanitarian equilibrium during a time of war, Witt elaborated during the Q & A. “Everyone agrees that killing prisoners is not helpful,” he noted. “Stable reciprocity is good for all.” For Witt, this is inspirational.

It was natural for the realms of justice and humanitarianism to be pulled back together after the debates of the Enlightenment. (In 1818 Congress spent months debating a hanging carried out by Andrew Jackson and a shady military tribunal.) “It was natural for Scott to close that gap still further,” Witt stated. “And natural for him not even to notice exactly what it was that he was doing.”

These initiatives of inventing and institutionalizing the war crime had implications for the Civil War, during which Abraham Lincoln re-introduced “ends based reasoning” in the Emancipation Proclamation. Many of Scott’s practices continue to hold sway to this day.

Ultimately, the law of war isn’t like a “stop sign” that we simply follow, Witt explained. The law is “a public language for discussing means and ends,” he said. “It’s a vocabulary of talking about extraordinarily difficult moral problems.”

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Watch full video here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido

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