I was county party chair, and we were in the midst of a divisive mayoral race between longtime Lucas County Treasurer and Ohio House Minority Leader Jack Ford, whose campaign was being run from party headquarters. It was primary day and, after dawn patrol, I’d come home to nap. The phone woke me up, and that’s how I learned that the twin towers were under attack. Although what was happening in New York was overwhelming, the craziness in Toledo claimed my attention for most of the rest of the day. I was on the county board of elections, and I went to that office where, believe it or not, a secretary had just announced to the media that the election was cancelled. It was chaos. The rest of the day was spent reassuring people that an attack on Toledo was unlikely, urging them to vote, and trying to figure out how, under these circumstances, the vote would turn out.
Fourteen years later, another divisive mayoral election is ongoing. My involvement is limited to writing a couple of checks. The Middle East is still turbulent. I have visited two countries in the region since 9-11. I visited three of the four quarters of Jerusalem’s old city in one short and exhausting day at the end of a week of greenhouse visits. I walked the Via Dolorosa on Palm Sunday. Just a year after 9-11, I travled to Lebanon as part of a US State Department-sponsored trip focused on the role of women in politics. Each day we traveled out from our hotel in Beirut to visit a different project and a different NGO, accompanied by the women who had created these NGO’s to provide crucial services during the war, when the government was virtually non-existent. One day we were panelists at a workshop, followed by a traditional lunch, at a community center in the Bekaa Valley, which I particularly remember. The breads were amazing, and I was introduced to ouzo. The building was open to the air, and Syrian tanks were in the background, just across the border.
We also visited Ba’albeck, where Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis have performed amid Roman ruins, which are built upon Greek ruins, which were built on a thriving Phoenician town. The cell phone reception was terrific, which was certainly not the case in Toledo at that time.
If I had not learned it before, these trips taught me that our history helps to shape our future, and that history, especially in the Middle East, is complex. Thinking about history puts 9-11 in a whole different perspective. Thinking about the Middle East puts Toledo politics in perspective too.
The only thing that is constant is change. Heraclitus