[THE OUTSIDER] JFK, 9/11 and now the end of May

When 9/11 happened, I heard about it in a London airport transit lounge, but the news was unclear. We were on one of the last planes out of London for a while, as it turned out, and only when we landed in İstanbul Atatürk Airport did we hear the extent of the damage. Even a cynic like me could not predict the profound and over-reaching changes the event presaged. That was Sept. 11, 2001.

And now, the End of May. My husband and I were in Gebze on Monday morning, in the shop of a traditional mattress maker who hand-quilts covers and mattresses stuffed with wool and cotton. Aziz Amca had the radio on and we listened with horror to news I could have lived forever without hearing. Would we go to war? Had Israel lost its collective mind? How could this have happened? We left Aziz’s shop and looked frantically for a television set. We found one in a little pide joint, whose employee let us turn the channel to the news. With more horror we heard more of how that beautiful ferry, heretofore visible to all, moored near Topkapı, seen on innumerable trips across the beautiful Bosporus, was now a scene of bloodshed and terror. That was May 31, 2010. The end of Turkey’s spring.

I am too old, and hopefully too wise, to hate any one group or people for any reason, but I am young enough and passionate enough to react with rage and sorrow to events of brutality and unnecessary violence, especially against a group so many of us had such high hopes for. I was carried mentally back to the 1960s when National Guardsmen, children themselves, opened fire on a group of university students at Ohio State who were protesting the war in Vietnam, killing four. I felt the same shock and horror of violence visited on innocence, of a rupture in civilization too awful to imagine.

The lives of the four in Ohio were a drop in the bucket compared to the Vietnamese and American blood spilled in the seemingly unending war in Vietnam. The lives of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the child-activist Princess Diana were as nothing compared to the victims of the evils they fought. The 3,000 who were blasted from their workplaces into an uncertain death during the attacks on 9/11 did not equal the number of victims from the Falklands War. And the nine activists who were mowed down in the middle of the Mediterranean on Monday were only nine, compared to the thousands of Palestinian and Israeli lives lost in the ongoing tragedy in Palestine.

Yet what these martyrs and victims have in common, and what makes their deaths greater than the sum of their individual lives, is the richness of the dreams they represented, the values of men and women daring to make a difference in the suffering of others, and the change effected by their last days on earth. The 9/11 victims as a group may have had no cause they were fighting for, but their deaths, all unwitting as they were, have nonetheless polarized a dialogue about human rights that may yet go on for years, hopefully with a positive outcome. The sum of such deaths becomes vastly geometrical by their significance.

I don’t know how many ends to innocence we can live through.

Fortunately, the men at the helm of our republic are men of peace and self-discipline. We must look to them to figure out a way to get through this, and not do anything to make their jobs any more difficult than they are. I believe a lot of the world is with us, and those that are not, are wrong. Mr. Gül, Mr. Erdoğan and Mr. Davutoğlu are men of restraint, of dreams for peace, and of great ability. We are lucky to have them. Many so-called leaders would have had the country at war, and for what good purpose? More killing is most emphatically not the answer.

The victims of the Mavi Marmara and their brave brethren who survived them have joined the long list of heroes and martyrs and activists who make our lives as humans on this planet possible, at least those of us who love and care and hope for a future free from war and constant political stress; who just want to raise our families, worship our God and get on with life.