ABSTRACT
Three days after September 11 in New York City. I walked the streets – empty of all traffic like a ghost town – downtown to Union Square on Friday to the unofficial memorial meeting. I knew that for three days and nights already hundreds of people at a time gathered there, lighting candles and writing on the pavement. What I saw was something one never saw during the Vietnam War: the people who wanted to bomb everybody and anybody and the people against all bombing were gathered together in grief. On the sidewalk in chalk in large letters: ‘Let’s bomb them, let’s show them they can’t do this to us!’ and right below it ‘NO! that will only cause more injury, we must find another way!’ The larger We of grief encompassed all the different voices as part of the human response to tragedy, the voice of ‘Us against Them’ and the voice of ‘Them and Us, we are all one.’ These conflicting voices were integrated in the symphonic power of loss, each a single instrument against the backdrop of the entire string section carrying the main theme: Nothing left to lose, our consolation lies in our compassion and tolerance for one another. This overarching sense of a lawful community that could hold contradictions and antagonisms represented the Third as I use the term – the space that holds and contains relational tension and growth. The ethical third, in my usage, is the lawful principle or principles that the group is committed to, which sustain the possibility of recognition among ourselves, and allows for renewal of that recognition when it breaks down (Benjamin, 2004).
