We were getting on the train in Semarang, bound for Jakarta, and needed some help with our bags. I had stacked them just outside the coach we were boarding. We had taken the same train ride before, and knew that we must be ready with about Rp. 3,000 for the porter. After he stowed our luggage, I offered the porter the usual tip. He refused, demanding more. So I offered him Rp. 5,000. He refused that too. He said I must pay him Rp. 15,000. I was shocked, not only concerning the amount of his demand, but also concerning the fact that he was making a demand on me at all. We had tipped our porters Rp. 3,000 or Rp. 5,000 several times and had never had a problem.

So I dug around in my wallet for Rp. 15,000. The closest I could come was Rp. 20,000. I ended up giving him almost seven times the normal amount. Several rows back, an Indonesian businessman saw this incident unfold. He rose from his seat, came up to me and addressed me in perfect English. "I know this doesn't seem fair to you. I usually pay Rp. 3,000 to the porters when I make this Jakarta run, and they are happy with it. But you are an American. They will not be happy with such a small amount from you. What you paid seems unfair to you, but really, it is fair. You paid him less than two dollars. Wouldn't you have tipped any porter in America two dollars or more for stowing those same bags? I have often traveled in the United States, and I know how tipping is done there."

I received an important lesson from this incident. Why am I connecting this small incident on a train in Semarang with the national tragedy we face today? I am suggesting that some of the same dynamics are at work in both incidents, although admittedly on vastly different scales. The Asians perceive us Americans to have had a free ride for close to fifty years. We bombed the daylights out of the Vietnamese for twenty-one years, with hardly any hint of damage to ourselves besides the cost of the bombing itself plus fifty thousand US military casualties, compared to the millions of innocent citizens, many of them women and children, that were killed by our bombs and our napalm in Vietnam. For the past ten years we have been continuing our bombing runs in Iraq with total impunity. I have not heard of a single US casualty, yet our country has been raining terror upon countless Iraqi villages.

To Asians and Middle Easterners, the loss of five or ten or even twenty thousand lives, two skyscrapers and one small section of the Pentagon does not seem like an unspeakable price to pay. The Asians and Middle Easterners have lived with infinitely greater losses inflicted by our country upon them.

However, to Americans, the meltdown of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon are unspeakable crimes. One radio commentator said that on September 11, 2001 America suffered the most casualties on American soil that it has ever suffered since the Civil War almost one hundred and fifty years ago. That observation makes this crime seem unspeakable, yet it also expresses a fact of history: the United States has been involved in two world wars, plus the Korean War, plus the Vietnam War, plus the Gulf War, plus dozens of other minor conflicts, and has never had to pay any price in significant civilian casualties or the disruptions usually associated with the wars. As a people, we have not had to pay the price for the wars in which we have participated. These facts of history are not lost upon those who hate America. We should never underestimate the profound convictions that these people carry in their hearts. The people who boarded the four flights last Tuesday morning with box cutters in their pockets did so with a commitment to serving justice. We think of them as misguided hoodlums. They thought of themselves as martyrs. They believed that God has a special place reserved in heaven for them because of what they were undertaking to do.

Someone asked the American poet laureate about suggesting an appropriate poem on which to meditate in these terrible times. He said, "You won't do any better than the Psalms." I believe he is right. I meditated on Psalm 11:2, 3: "Look how the wicked bend the bow and fit their arrow to the string, to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" This ancient text accurately describes terrorism. It acknowledges the fact that terrorism has a terrible price tag attached to it. Terrorism not only kills people. Terrorism destroys the foundations of society, and when those foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?