If you know me, or if you have been Drawing from the Well, you will know that I grew up in the rolling hills of northeastern Mississippi. Oktibbeha County, to be exact. Oktibbeha is the Choctaw word for something approximating, “ice, there in the creek,” and it is an apt name for this part of the state during winter.
The terrain of Oktibbeha and the surrounding counties of this region of Mississippi is graced with the rolling hills that become the Appalachian foothills as you progress northeast. And if you have spent any time roaming through this region, you will no doubt be familiar with a beautiful green ivy—even if you do not know its name—that covers many of these rolling hillsides.
Kudzu.
An ornamental plant transplanted from Japan in the late 1800s. But it is also what the Mississippi State University Extension Service has identified as a noxious invasive weed. It consumes and assumes everything it touches.
There is no doubt that kudzu presents as a beautiful ornamental ivy, but there is likewise no doubt that kudzu rewrites any landscape that it invades. It shades and overshadows any area into which it spreads. It chokes the life out of what preexisted it, and it has evolved into a hard-to-kill vine that will continue to grow if left unchecked.
If you spend a lot of time traversing the roads of northeastern Mississippi, eventually kudzu becomes a natural part of the landscape. Something accepted. Something overlooked. Something that begins to appear natural and welcome instead of revealing its true nature.
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, I woke up early and quickly dressed to head to an indoor tennis facility to hit balls with two older church members. I was living in Shreveport, and I was the associate pastor of Broadmoor United Methodist Church. To be honest, I was not happy about the early morning tennis, but I knew enough to know that responding positively to two older members of my church was more important than my morning plans.
On my drive to the tennis club, my mother called to ask if I knew that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Only a few years earlier I had lived just across the river in northern New Jersey while attending seminary. We briefly discussed what must have been an accident, and I continued to the club. When I arrived, I found people gathered around a television and watched with them as the second plane struck the second tower. It was instantaneously and abundantly clear that the world had just changed. I was no longer interested in tennis balls, but my companions were insistent—so we spent an hour or so hitting balls on the court.
After tennis, I ran home to change and then off to the office. Eventually I ended up at a friend’s house as we watched Aaron Brown on CNN for the rest of the day—interrupted only by the noise of F-16s overhead and the appearance of Air Force One crossing the sky on its descent into Barksdale. Suddenly events that were real became local—and the stress of the day skyrocketed.
It would take twenty-five years for me to understand the link between the noxious invasive species kudzu and the seeds that were planted on that September Tuesday.
The scenes that unfolded on TV for months and the heartache of those directly and indirectly affected would change the landscape of the American experience. The nation would gel around unity in a way it had not for some time, and the American resolve would demonstrate the power of unity in the midst of great tragedy. But even in the midst of great resolve, seeds were planted in the Great American Heartland through an act of unbridled terrorism, and they continue to propagate as if they were kudzu on a northeastern Mississippi hillside.
There was a very clear sense of American resolve—but it was laced with the as-yet-ungerminated seeds of hate, suspicion, tribalism, chronic emergency and the loss of fundamental trust.
These seeds did not germinate on their own. There is no doubt that those who sowed them on that day had every hope that the seeds would take hold and become like kudzu, but they did not have the power to cultivate and grow the seeds they had planted—they were forced to rely on us to do it for them. And twenty-five years of retrospection make it abundantly clear that America can truly grow ANYTHING that is planted.
Responsibility for tending the kudzu falls on all of us. I responded within the same national moment, and it would eventually lead me to join the Navy, where I served for twenty-three years. I believe I never personally tended the hate, but I participated in a culture that allowed it to grow. I served honorably within that culture, believed deeply in much of the mission, and only with the distance of time have I come to see more clearly some of the consequences that grew alongside the service and sacrifice.
We watered the seeds that would become the next noxious invasive species—first with fear. A new cabinet agency, federalized airport security, a color-coded threat index, the promise that more danger was imminent, and the advent of the forever wars provided something far more effective than Miracle-Gro for the seeds of fear that were planted in our midst.
And following the mechanism of kudzu’s growth, we allowed the wholesale acceptance of suspicion to morph from an emotion directed at the known to one directed at the unknown as we sought new targets for our suspicion and new fuel for our righteous indignation.
Once we nailed down the new suspects and accepted the unchecked growth of our suspicions, we began to draw lines in the sand—even when those on the other side were the neighbors we have known for years.
In time, our unquenchable thirst for suspicion and finger-pointing led us to build entrenched camps—homogeneity inside what had once been truly heterogeneous.
And like the Americans before us, we were driven to perfect our new approach to life—maximizing suspicion to the point where trust was fractured and the Blue and the Gray were resurrected in new forms.
Make no mistake—we are experts in cultivating seeds. Our history is replete with examples. We perfected the trade in humans and the enslavement of people; we mastered the art of suspicion, incarcerating Japanese Americans en masse and interning German Americans deemed suspect on the chance that they might be saboteurs, and we repressed an entire race that we had already subjugated because we identified them as other rather than human.
If we are honest with ourselves—which we have proven over and over we struggle to do—we must admit that we already knew the recipe, we already knew the agricultural techniques, we already possessed the propensity to cultivate planted seeds that should never have earned the light of day. And now the events of September 11, 2001, were asking us to decide yet again.
Tomorrow is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the deadliest act of terrorism ever directed at our nation. It is also the anniversary of the planting of seeds—kudzu seeds. The intervening years have told us that the acts of terrorism perpetrated on that Tuesday did not end in the moment. Seeds were planted, and we collectively put our weight behind making them grow.
Kudzu is kudzu. It is a noxious invasive species. But it is also beautifully seductive. It blends in. It hides blighted spaces. It has the ability to make us believe the landscape is lush even when it is merely masking decay.
And kudzu is prophetically descriptive of where we find ourselves on this twenty-fifth anniversary.
Let me be clear—Al Qaeda planted seeds on 9/11—they intended destruction, they intended to rip at the heart of the American people, they believed they were attacking the Great Satan—but they also sowed seeds whether they intended to do so or not. I suspect this was their hope—and the result has exceeded anything they imagined.
They planted seeds of hate, suspicion, tribalism, chronic emergency and the loss of trust—but all they could do was sow the seeds and hope for the best. Hope that America would repeat what America has mastered in the past. And we did not disappoint.
We have replaced the hate of foreign terrorists with a hate for each other. We have replaced the suspicion of outsiders with a distinct and pointed suspicion for insiders. We have replaced the notion of good versus evil with us versus them—ensconcing tribalism as the primary concern of the American people. We accepted the “promise” of chronic emergency and installed it as a defining characteristic of the American psyche.
And we morphed the loss of trust in humanity into a loss of trust in ourselves.
Like the kudzu of my Mississippi childhood, we have allowed the seeds planted on 9/11 to grow into a noxious invasive species of their own that has choked out almost all of what has made America the shining city on the hill. We have allowed the promise of democracy and civic engagement to be replaced with something far more profane and corrupt. And we have cultivated it on our own. We have done a damn good job of making our kudzu grow.
This year we mark the 250th anniversary of our founding and the promise of a nation the founders hoped would be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even though we have spread our own version of Miracle-Gro on the seeds that were planted on 9/11, and we have further fertilized them with the tainted waters of our past, there is something lurking underneath. Something holding on, seeking to survive despite the darkness of the overgrowth.
When you peel back the kudzu of Mississippi, you find evidence of the past. Houses that were once grand, hillsides that once represented the fertile soil for the South. Likewise, when you pull back the kudzu of 9/11, you can still see what has always been good about America. You can see the collective identity, the promise of freedom, the care for fellow citizens, the united cause of liberty—the task is to remove the overgrowth to allow the remnants to regain their place in our lives.
In order to recover what is worth preserving from the America we once imagined it to be, we must intentionally begin to prune back the overgrowth, to pluck the weeds from the soil, and to commit ourselves to the work of repentance as a nation seeking to once again find its way through the overgrowth.
Our act of national repentance requires a diversion from the path we are following and an intentional return to the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone who occupies these shores.
This act of turning requires us to rebuild trust between neighbors, to end the suspicion and intrusion so present in the lives of our community. We must begin to see each other in the image of God and not as some foreign invader who is depriving us of our own claim to liberty.
If, however, we refuse to adjust, we risk ending the experiment of liberty before it has reached its summit.
As we revisit that September Tuesday, let us instead remember the unity of a nation confronted by tragedy. Let us again go out of our way to help the person beside us. Let us celebrate all of the commonalities and refuse to fall victim to the hate sown on that infamous day.
Let us refuse to water the noxious invasive species and instead water the spirit of unity that makes America such a wonderful place to explore the possibilities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.