This week, we remember the people who were killed one year ago. Those who would govern struggle to find meaning from these deaths and countless other deaths like them.
There is little we can do to provide solace to those who have lost their loved ones. There is little we can do to comfort all humankind for such deaths. All we can do is to look back at the causes of this pain and look ahead to preventing more bloodshed.
Whether we call violence an act of war, of terrorism or of crime may ultimately matter little. What matters is to learn how some people who love their own families can justify killing members of other people's families. If we can grasp the twisted logic of what some call "justice," perhaps we can work toward a social vaccine against it.
From Oklahoma City to Jerusalem, from Hitler to bin Laden, the self-righteous murder of innocents may share a common cause. That cause is not religion. It is not race. It is not gender. Nor is it the self-determination of nations. It is the perception of injustice.
New York City has seen such violence before, with adults killing children, office buildings under attack and large areas reduced to rubble -- all in the name of defying an injustice. One hundred-thirtynine years ago this July, the publisher of The New York Times stood atop his newspaper building with a primitive machine gun aimed at crowds of rioters protesting the drafting of poor men to fight in the American Civil War.
For an entire week, immigrant workers clashed with immigrant police as white people dragged black people from their homes to lynch them, blaming blacks for the new draft law. That law allowed anyone rich enough to pay a fee in lieu of being drafted. That fee was equal to one year's salary for an immigrant laborer.
One week earlier, 5,000 men had died at the Battle of Gettysburg. The new draft law carried 1-in-10 odds that a drafted Union soldier would die in battle. Yet rich men like Theodore Roosevelt Sr. could buy their way out of harm's way by paying cash.
One law for the rich and one for the poor was clearly an injustice. More important, it was seen as an injustice. It was seen as an injustice so great that it incited the collective madness of revenge. The quest to remedy perceived injustice not only caused the burning of an orphanage and tearing rich men to death, limb from limb; it also provided moral justification for self-destruction, charging into Union Army lines in New York to avoid Confederate Army lines in the Shenandoah.
The paradox of uncounted hundreds dying to avoid the risk of death is really no paradox at all. The cause of their death was, in their eyes, a "cause" worth dying for. And while such causes must always exist, the task of governance is to keep them to a bare minimum.
Government will never eliminate injustice, let alone perceptions of injustice. It will never eliminate murder in any form. But it can reduce both injustice and violence.
As we look ahead to reducing such harm, let us never forget the causes of self-righteous violence. Let not the illusion, or even the reality, of a vigilant defense distract us from that point. Let us match defense with dialogue, security with sensibility and law enforcement with listening. Let us hear the voices of all who cry "injustice," even as we stop the evil acts they try to cleanse with that word. Let us seek the social vaccine against such violence in democracy through deliberation, here at home and around the world, on every Sept. 11 and every other day of the year.
Lawrence Sherman is a professor of sociology and director of the Fels Institute of Government.
