Our View: Five years later, we still search for truth of Sept. 11

In September 1906, Mahatma Gandhi was living in South Africa. This young man from India had been humiliated time and time again in the British colony. He was thrown off trains when he tried to sit in first-class compartments. He transformed this personal humiliation into a burning desire to stop the oppressive, daily humiliations of Indians living without basic freedoms in British colonies.

Gandhi initiated the nonviolent struggle against oppression and injustice, a movement so successful that its methods were duplicated 60 years later by Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S. civil rights movement.

A pivotal day in Gandhi’s movement was Sept. 11, 1906, when 3,000 Indians – “both Hindu, Muslim, free and indentured, gathered at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg to voice their outrage,” according to a history of the movement written by University of California professor Michael Nagler.

The term “Satyagrapha” was coined that day. It means “clinging to the truth.”

The 100th anniversary of Satyagrapha is being celebrated by peace activities throughout the United States today, overshadowed by the fifth anniversary of this country’s Sept. 11.

The sadness of the day compounds when you reflect on how little common truth there has been to cling to since the horrific events five years ago. Almost immediately, conspiracy theorists pounded the Internet with “evidence” the United States government engineered the whole thing.

Five years later, citizens are still in search of the truth about what Sept. 11 has meant to our country and the world. And still our nation grieves, as it experiences grief’s complex emotions: denial, anger, sadness, cynicism, resignation.

The anger arises for some as they realize that five years later, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind Sept. 11, is still at large but no longer the focus of U.S. energy and attention. Energy, money and military intelligence have been channeled instead to Iraq, where the U.S. military death toll blasts beyond 2,600. This was a war begun in a manipulated “truth” that was ultimately outed as a falsehood. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Meanwhile, as resources continue to pour into an Iraq imploding from daily bloodshed, there is still no mechanism for securing America’s vulnerable ports or ground transportation systems or securing “soft” terrorist targets, such as sports arenas and shopping malls.

In airport security lines, mascara and shampoo are taken away, and travelers accept this as part of the price of safe travel. Fortunately, some have been much less resigned to believe that the war on terror must mean the eroding of personal freedoms. They have protested heavy-handed government wiretapping and secret prisons.

In the five years since Sept. 11, citizens have accepted that a country founded and grounded in personal liberty will always be at risk, will always be a target for others who do not share the same values of freedom. The country’s citizens are not as trusting or as naïve as they were before Sept. 11, and this is a good thing.

However, it is unlikely that 100 years from now, people here will be celebrating Sept. 11 because of the transformative cultural changes it meant for all in society. It will remain a somber day, part of an anxious and conflicted time when truth was difficult to discern and even harder to hold onto.