The Mysterious Power of Blind Spots

President Bush had one of his rare press conferences on Monday, March 21st and during it, something very interesting happened. Veteran journalist Helen Thomas asked the President a question many Americans have been longing to hear: “Why did you really go to war? . . . What was your real reason?” You could hear the gasps in the room from the audaciousness of her question. What was even more audacious, for those willing to hear, is that he may have actually answered her question–to the best of his ability.For the past three years people on the left have been vociferous on one theme, that President Bush lied and led us into war. You can still see the bumper stickers everywhere that he lied to us. There is a kind of magical thinking in the public discourse that if enough people criticize the President harshly enough then somehow he is going to to suddenly get honest and reveal the real reason he led us into war. It presupposes that there is a consciouslie and with enough public pressure he will fess up, admit the lie and come clean. Sort of like a huge version of being called to the Principal’s office by the American public. Yet with all the pressure he hasn’t come clean and I doubt he will ever come clean because he doesn’t believe that he has lied, within the commonly understood meaning of the word lie. He doesn’t believe that he has done anything wrong and the more he is accused of doing something wrong, the more strenuously he defends himself and argues that he was doing something right. He was defending the country for gosh sakes!If we truly wanted to understand the president’s actions in leading us into an unpopular war, and if we wanted to find a peaceful, humane and dignified way to conclude that conflict, then I believe, a whole new way of understanding the President’s actions as a human being is called for. Much political hay has been made of the fact that when President Bush was first notified of the attacks on the Twin Towers he kept right on reading a story about a goat to a class of first graders. Why didn’t the Secret Service pull him out of there immediately? Why didn’t he race out of the room and jump into action? Why, in photographs does he have that strange glazed look in his eyes as he reads to the children? I understand, I think, some part of what was going on with him at that moment because I know that place in myself and it is amazing to me that no one else has pointed it out. My hunch is the President was in shock. Look at it this way; the unthinkable had just happened, something so horrific that the mind could not take it in. The President was not the only one in shock. Apparently the people surrounding him, his advisers and the Secret Service were in shock also. No one was thinking straight. But the trauma was worst for him because he was and is Commander in Chief. He was supposed to know what to do and he did not know what to do.  I believe he was in that numb frozen state where you feel like you are swimming under water and you can’t act because you are traumatized. This is not to defend or criticize the man. It is simply how the brain works when trauma happens. It’s happened to me during some critical events in my life and it happened to lots of people on 9/11. Some important people got caught with their pants down that day, including people who had been trained how to react in emergencies. We hope that presidents will know what to do in unthinkable emergencies, that they will rise to the occasion if the horrific happens and that they will act wisely and nobly.  Yet we are so unforgiving if they act like a human being and freeze. Don’t forget that President Bush never served in the military. If he had, he might have had some training under fire which might have prepared him for an emergency like 9/11. But he wasn’t and he reacted like he reacted. My hunch is that September 11, 2001 was the single worst day of his life and that he still hasn’t gotten over it. And I also think that no matter how much that the left and liberals may criticize and beat up on him for being an incompetent president, he probably on some level, has never forgiven himself for not having acted more quickly and more powerfully in those minutes and hours after he first heard about the attacks. I also bet that he has never told anyone about this, with the possible exception of Laura Bush.What happens to people who carry a secret, a self-humiliation that they don’t forgive themselves for, don’t work it through and let go of it?  It goes underground,  deep inside the human soul and develops into a strange attractor, a phenomenon that I will call a blind spot.  A blind spot is something that we do or say or  that every one else can see about us but we can’t see ourselves.  It’s like the guy who gets a divorce and tells everyone he’s “can’t stand the bitch” but everyone knows he’s still in love with her. Or the secretary who writes great reports, yet complains about her job all the time, blames the boss and co-workers and is terrified to admit to herself she really wants to chuck it all and be a novelist! Blind spots! What if President Bush was completely humiliated on 9/11 and publicly embarrassed that he froze and didn’t do a better job in those first few hours? What if he had an image in his mind of what a good, powerful, manly leader would do after an attack such as we suffered that day? What if he swore revenge to himself: “I’ll get you back, if it kills me?”

What if, when he answered Helen Thomas’s question he was telling the truth? Maybe he was absolutely right. Maybe he didn’t want to go to war because wanting is a conscious choice and he didn’t consciously want to take young men and women to their deaths. So no, perhaps he didn’t want to go to war in Iraq. But anyone who was paying close attention in the fall of 20o2 and early 2003 could feel that President Bush and his administration needed to go to war. It was palpable. It was inexorable. We were going to war come hell or high water because something, some need was driving us to war and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t rational. It didn’t matter that the intelligence didn’t fit. It didn’t matter that there were no WMD. It didn’t matter that there weren’t any allies to speak of to work with us. None of that mattered. When you have an unconscious need or drive, one that hasn’t been examined and understood, then it becomes more important than anything. And unfortunately for 2319 young Americans, that meant losing their lives, and for 17,000 Americans that meant wounds that may never heal and we are not even counting here the numberless lives lost, incomparable grief and anguish among the Iraqi people themselves. What an incredibly sad, sad state of affairs.

 And of course, you don’t have to buy my explanation, for it is simply that, an explanation, an attempt to understand another human being’s actions. Others have said that there was and is far more going on with President Bush and his allies, that led to the decision to pursue the war in Iraq, that war plans against that nation were in progress long before 911. It is, perhaps, a fool’s game, to try to understand the actions of people from afar, who offer no explanations,  especially people like the President and his associates, men not given to self-examination and certainly not ones to look at hidden parts of themselves like these mysterious blind spots. For all we know, there was or are blind spots in the psychology of one or more of these men, coming from their pasts, that paved the way for them to need this war and the shock and trauma of 911 provided the perfect opportunity to act. We shall never know unless one of them decides to disclose this at some point in the future.

What does any of this have to do with us? Human beings love to go to war and we seem to be addicted to the phenomenon. During the countdown to the Iraq war I was reading Chris Hedges’ superb book, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” I recommend it highly.  If the example of 911 and the Iraq War, are any indication, unacknowledged blind spots on the part of political leaders (and even whole nations!) may lie underneath the reasons that keep us going to war, generation after generation, losing far too many precious lives.  If we are ever to eradicate the use of war to solve problems on this planet we are going to have to find other ways to deal with this human tendency to cling to our blind spots, to refuse to talk about perceived weaknesses and embarrassments. We will have to find ways to develop the habit of self-reflection.  How different the world would be if our world leaders were committed to their own growth and development and routinely took responsibility for their own errors and mistakes. Our present leaders are still stuck in the paradigm be tough and strong and stay the course. There is a time and place for that certainly but there is also a need for humility and sometimes for vulnerability. I wish President Bush well. I truly do. I fear for his emotional and spiritual health once he leaves office. He does have the loving support of his life partner in his wife Laura and he does appear to have a solid faith in God. He will them.

Questions of Inquiry:
1. If we wanted to create a climate of openness and support, that encouraged our present world leaders to take such responsibility and facilitated their growth and development, how might we do that?

2. How can we build habits of self-reflection and learn to look at and see our own blind spots?

3. Once a march toward war starts, how can we encourage our media and our leaders to slow down and look for what else is going on, to look for underlying causes and contributing factors?