The Sacrifice

By: Lisa Kadonaga

Don't get me wrong - I love the English language. But there are some words which make me feel very uncomfortable... downright uneasy, in fact. And over the past twelve months, there's one word in particular that's started to bring me to revulsion, even nausea.

Sacrifice.

In the old days, back when many world religions prayed to vengeful and terrifying gods, a blood sacrifice was something - usually an animal, but sometimes a human - that would lie patiently on the alter, trussed-up and not really comprehending, for the sacred knife to dedicate them to Yahweh, or Odin, or Jupiter. Some altars even had special grooves cut into them, to direct the flow of blood more efficiently. On those occasions when I'm in a church, I think about this as I contemplate the spotless cloth and polished chalices.

Judaism, and most Christian sects, stopped sacrificing live creatures many centuries ago. These days, secure in the thought that we don't do that kind of thing anymore, our offerings take the form of crisp bills slipped into a discreet little envelope, or a neat stack of canned goods for the food bank. The word "sacrifice" slipped into a different context: "We scrimped and sacrificed for years to send our children to college", or "The company is asking employees to sacrifice in order to keep the plant from closing".

(Given recent events, I confess to bursting out in inappropriate laughter at the thought of white-robed officiates unloading crates of live chickens at the Nortel facility down the street.) But at any rate, the meaning of the word now implies something we are doing ourselves, as a conscious choice, rather than inflicting on an unsuspecting quadruped.

Political leaders have been mentioning sacrifice a great deal lately, and as the anniversary of the September 11^th attacks approaches, we can expect to hear it applied more. "Sacrifice" is being upheld as a great virtue, and applied (along with "courage" and "loyalty" and "duty") to the fallen - especially the firefighters and other emergency crews who rushed to the scene.

There is nothing wrong in recognizing that the families of those people, and of the civilians who also perished, lost a world when the towers fell. But the declarations that the office workers and cleaning staff who perished were "patriotic", and that the police and paramedics were demigods, leave out some important things.

They were afraid. Many of the people who died at the World Trade Center, or at the Pentagon, or in a field in Pennsylvania, were just going about their business, on an ordinary day that suddenly turned into hell. Many of them summoned their courage and dignity in their final moments, but that's something that goes beyond patriotism, beyond any thoughts of a nation-state.

Much has been made recently of a "culture of victimhood", but in the original sense, stripped of the fashionable sneering, what else do you call a person who has been murdered but a "victim"?

We can try to remember that all these people led unique, diverse lives up until that last hour - but that also forces us to consider some unpleasant facts. The emergency crews entered the buildings with a faulty communications setup that did not enable them to hear the warnings of collapse until it was too late. Whether due to lack of foresight, or stinginess, the authorities allowed this to happen.

The intelligence agencies of the mightiest government on Earth received warnings about potential terrorist attacks, but due to a failure to "connect the dots", nothing was done. Only a handful of fighter jets were scrambled, and by that time it was too late. Months before, a report had been presented to the administration, warning of the dangers to commercial aircraft posed by hijackers. Its security recommendations were not implemented.

So when I hear about the dead of September 11^th being referred to as a "sacrifice" - I shiver. Consciously or not, this word choice implies that somebody knew what could happen. In ancient times, sacrifices were made to appease a god who was angry, or in the hopes of winning a favor - getting something you want. And these days, I fear that the old gods are still very much alive, only they've changed their names - "Greed", say, or "Power".

Questions such as "who" and "what" are so terrible to contemplate, I don't want to think about them. Yet we all must. Salman Hamdani, who rescued injured pigeons from the streets of New York as a child, ran to offer his assistance at the WTC when he saw the smoke from the fires. A Pakistani immigrant who loved his country even though it would not allow him to become President (something he longed for during his brief life), he died when the tallest buildings in his city fell on top of him. Instead of demanding vengeance, his family joined the "Peaceful Tomorrows" organization, calling for an end to bloodshed.

And someone had decided that LeRoy Homer Jr. and his colleagues were already expendable, to some extent. Those in authority decided not to take precautions to protect airline employees, even though there were warnings about hijackings earlier that year. Today, Mr. Homer is remembered as the co-pilot of Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. I never met him, but a few years ago he came to my hometown, to marry one of my grade school classmates. They had a baby daughter.

If men like these are a "sacrifice", to be used to help get others what they want - what of the rest of us?

We should not let anyone shame us into remaining silent, when we want to ask questions, and probe beyond the facile one-size-fits-all response of "they hate us for our freedoms". Knowing that these deaths may have been prevented may be even more painful than the loss of those human beings - but if we are to prevent even more grief in the future, bearing that knowledge is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.