My recent reflections on the debate over the Park Islamic Cultural Center have been fueled and inspired by my personal experiences surrounding the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.

After 9/11, I despaired. As I put it in The Politics of Small Things, it hurt to think. I knew that the people who attacked the World Trade Center really were a threat, but the political responses to the threat seemed to me to be wrong.

The attack hit very close to home. Two close friends were in the Towers, one survived, a childhood friend, Steve Assael, but one was killed, Mike Asher, my closest adult friend . On that fateful day, I didn’t know what had happened to either of my friends. In the days, weeks and months that followed, as I attended to personal consequences of the attacks, I was dismayed by the public response.

A war on terrorism was declared which didn’t make much sense, as the very real threat of Al Qaeda was not sufficiently recognized by anti-war critics. Terrorism and anti-terrorism seemed to be replacing Communism and ideological anti-Communism (the most radical and resolute form of which were Fascism and Nazism), and many who were critical of these tendencies were not realisticly facing up to the challenges of the day. Simple Manichaeism again overlooked global complexity across the political spectrum. There did not seem to be any alternative, as the Republican President was getting carried away, pushed by a broad wave of popular support, and the Democrats in Congress, and reporters and commentators in the media, dared not question the patriotic effervescence.

My book, which was dedicated to Mike, was an attempt to explore how alternatives on the margins did provide grounds for hope. Specific small interactions provided alternatives to faulty grand narratives, people meeting each other on the basis of shared concerns and commitments, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. constituting political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I knew how important such power was in the development of the democratic . . .

Read more: Park 51 and the Politics of Small Things