A Rumpus Lamentation on What We Lost
Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you’d see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that day. Most of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and age-related illnesses, roughly 1500 were murders, hundreds more were due to civil wars. Also, 2,977 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.
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A lot of human beings died, that’s my point. They all left behind mourners.
Imagine the mother who watched her child die of hunger. Here’s this tiny person, a daughter. She has a name, a face. She doesn’t explode or fall from a skyscraper. She simply stops breathing. No cameras record her final moment, the lamentation of that mother. These images are not replayed on the television over and over and over. What would be the point of that?
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I recently went on a radio program to discuss the literature of 9/11. The host spent most of the hour chatting with people about their memories. They all talked about watching television. They were telling personal stories about watching television.
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One of the duties of the artist – not the only duty, but a central one – is to impel people to imagine the complexity of thought and feeling inside another person. Art complicates moral action, because we have to accept that other people matter, that their hardship and suffering, even their rage and sorrow, are, to some extent, our responsibility.
Propaganda has the opposite aim: it is intended to simplify moral action. People get to disregard the humanity of others. This makes them easier to ignore, deport, imprison, torture, enslave, and kill.
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The story of 9/11, the grand fiction we constructed as a culture in the days and months and years afterward, ran something like this:
A band of religious psychopaths, acting without rational motive, murdered the innocence of a proud and blameless nation. Slowly, heroically, that brave nation dug out from the rubble and exacted revenge.
It was a story bled dry of doubt or nuance, a piece of propaganda. It divided the world along the fault-line of the zealot. America had been wronged and therefore could do no wrong.
***
At one point on this radio show, a TV producer discussed his decision to stop showing footage of the attacks. The host said she wanted to see those images; that she wanted to remember what had happened and how she’d felt. She was glad networks were going to re-broadcast that footage in the next few days. She added that didn’t want to see people jumping to their deaths, just the towers falling.
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One of the novels I talked about on this radio show was Mao II by Don DeLillo. It envisions an age in which the novelist’s power to “alter the inner life of the culture” has been hijacked by terrorists whose “major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings.” Mao II was written in 1991.
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If one of my relatives had died that day …
But, you see, none of them did. It felt fraudulent to me to appropriate the emotional life of those in mourning, to pretend those atrocities were something personal, to rhapsodize about national unity. What I felt was dread, a sense that my country was going to respond precisely as the terrorists intended: by becoming less human.
I visited a friend a week after the attacks, a good-hearted fellow who spent a lot of his time and money establishing a school for at-risk kids. He told me that he didn’t know exactly who’d done this to us, but that he wouldn’t mind seeing Uncle Sam drop a few hundred bombs on them. He looked down as he said this, because he knew, I think, that it was a shameful thing to say, that he was calling for other human beings to be killed, not because they had harmed him, or his family, but because they had harmed his sense of omnipotence.
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The first line of the Iliad:
Sing, oh goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation
***
There was so much talk back then about how much we were feeling. We had all these feelings. The histrionics of the daytime talk shows infiltrated prime time. A culture addicted to images of artificial violence had finally gotten a jolt the real stuff: the unscripted ruin, the blood relics. It was a snuff film writ large. People got off on it. Watching the coverage was a turn-on: the pornography of grief. There was a sense of hysterical indulgence to it all, a bullying narcissism.
Nobody stood up – in Congress, in the bright studios of our corporate media, in city hall – to make the obvious point that millions of people in other parts of the world live in a state of perpetual danger. And that the events of 9/11 might therefore require of us a greater empathy for those suffering elsewhere, might even nudge us toward a more serious consideration of our own imperial luxuries and abuses, and how these might relate to the deprivations suffered in less fortunate precincts.
That’s not what we talked about. No, we talked about our feelings. Americans were bloated with empathy in the weeks after 9/11. But something fatal was happening: as a nation, we were consenting to pursue vengeance over mercy. We were deciding – with the help of all that deeply feeling propaganda on our television sets – that the only human suffering that mattered was American.
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The tragedy of 9/11, then, wasn’t that 2,977 people died. It was that 2,977 Americans died.
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In Corsica, the social code known as vendetta required Corsicans to kill anyone who wronged the family honor. One fourth of the population of Corsica was murdered, thanks to this code, in three short decades.
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Freud and others were fascinated by the concept of “infantile omnipotence.” This is what a child feels early in his life, and what he must eventually surrender, when he realizes he does not, and cannot, control the world.
There are some people, though, who can never quite accept this truth. They don’t have a strong enough sense of self to sustain the psychic injury. And thus, they resort to magical thinking, delusions of grandeur, angry projections, wild superstitions. They become, in this sense, more closely aligned with primitive cultures.
It is my belief that the enduring legacy of 9/11 resides in a permanent regression of the body politic, a narcissistic injury that we return to as a talisman of self-victimization, and which allows us to frame our sadistic urges as moral duties.
The attacks stunted our capacity to accept the awful truth of the world. This is most obvious in the ravings of demagogues. But in the end, the demagogues merely provide cover for our own quieter, more subtle abdications.
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Let us return to the long view, to the benevolent celestial being who may (or may not) be looking down upon us, and ask: Has the mass murder that transpired a decade ago made us a more compassionate people? More united? Less fearful? Less paranoid?
And if not, why not?
I believe the transmission of stories has something to do with this. Watching a building collapse on television is not a story. It engages the viewer in a spectacle, not an act of moral imagination.
What of the stories we tell ourselves, and our children? What do we, as artists, as parents, as citizens and activists, ask of our leaders? What do we ask of ourselves? That we gaze backwards at a misty image of our own bruised nobility? That we look ahead to some childish rapture? What of the horrors and holocausts of our present? What of the girl, her mother? Can the heart still feel what the heart must feel?
73 responses
This is brave and knowing and sad and very, very good. I hope that many people agree with you–for what it’s worth, I do.
This is a great piece, and I’m sharing it through as many avenues as I can. Thank you for writing it.
Your bravery is obvious. Lamenting the past can become self indulgent and narcissistic and Americans do that very well. And no, well very few talk about the more than 3,000 who die everyday just trying to live a normal life in unbelievably sad circumstances. snap. another gone. snap…another
I’m glad you wrote this and glad I read it.
This gives voice to exactly how I have been feeling about the stilted reaction to what was clearly a tragedy but not one of epic proportion nor the only tragedy that occurred on that particular day. We lost more than those sad people on Sept. 11, 2001. We lost something of our humanity, our innate capability for goodness, and our empathy.
I rather stupidly stood in front of a crowd of university people several days after this event and pointed out how the phallic nature of the towers were oddly juxtaposed against the feminine, earthen caves in which our attacking faction were supposed to have hidden themselves. I have suffered no worse silence in front of any crowd, and I am a teller of bad jokes. The feeling was, how dare I do anything but be in grief. My question is and always has been, are we the bad guys? Look at how we’ve behaved in the world. Look at the things we were concerned with before we were attacked–nothing but money and celebrity. The 1990s were a big party in the U.S., and we had forgotten we were even in a bigger world. We are clearly the great destroyers of this planet’s habitats. We can’t stop sucking the blood from her depths. And what did those towers represent but the money powers. And what is the reason for our destructive habits if not money?
This is all a long way of saying thank you for this rational, real-minded article. A virtual tip of the hat to you, sir.
I don’t know. This piece feels a bit too much like an admonishment, a scolding to anyone who felt grief about the 2,977 people who died on 9/11 (not all of whom were Americans, even though they died here). It seemed to say, to me, that anyone who felt angry or unsafe or mournful or devastated only did so because they bought into the false narrative that sprung up afterwards. As if these would not all be valid reactions when an otherwise ordinary day is interrupted by television broadcasts of collapsing buildings. Or as if someone had chosen not to watch the television that would have made them somehow better or more pure or more righteous than those that did.
Did I read the tone and intention of this piece completely wrong?
The stories we tell our children about 9/11, about the deaths that happened that day in America or around the world, can be different than the narrative the President tried to sell us, the one a media company tries to sell us. Not because we are artists subscribing to a higher moral order (bullshit), but because we are humans who see the world differently and choose otherwise.
Also, this: “Nobody stood up – in Congress, in the bright studios of our corporate media, in city hall – to make the obvious point that millions of people in other parts of the world live in a state of perpetual danger.”
Well, they don’t stand up to say this on any other day, either. I don’t hold them in greater contempt because they failed to say so on 9/11. In fact, I think that’s the one day I forgive them for not doing so.
Steve, once again you see what others do not see. As always, I enjoy your take on a subject that matters, whatever someone’s point of view.
While my son had a friend who died in the attacks, my son – the one who got married a few months ago – the son who was supposed to be there – wasn’t. I was glad his appointment with the NJ & NY Transit Authority had been rescheduled. So, my feelings are naturally very mixed. He’s alive; his friend isn’t. All because of a scheduling issue.
“If not, why not,” is the question we all need to answer regarding that day of mass murder and our sense of compassion or not…as well as our ability to say, “No we won’t stand for any peoples to destroy a country because they pray differently, because they are Jewish.”
The arabs hate the US not for our greed and overbearing nature, but for our willingness to side with the Jews. That’s the underlying issue that sparks all of the hatred toward the US.
Please keep writing about the things that matter, we need to read and think about them. You walk a fine line in your pieces, yet you manage to make it all work. And, as always I love to read your writing.
Tina
I have a friend whose husband died that day. He did not die in the attacks. He died of a brain tumor, after several months of suffering. They had been high school sweethearts, were around forty years old, and intended to spend their entire lives together. She is who I think of the most often, her mourning the one that touches me deeply, as we approach this 10 year anniversary.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
An obvious correction: on that day, the murder count wasn’t roughly 1500 but roughly 4500. Something any benevolent celestial being would be sure to mournfully note.
Also, allow me to apologize for feeling antipathy towards the people who killed my friend’s dad. Next time (you know, the time that is ever hastened by those those who would pursue mercy over vengeance), I will try to let my higher nature win out.
THANK YOU! This has so desperately needed to be said, I believe. And I have long thought it, but barely dared whisper it. And you said it beautifully, artfully & with such courageous honesty. Isn’t it strange, come to think of it, that since 911, almost all honesty takes courage. Speaking truth to power.
Good to know I’m not alone in thinking that the tragedy was exceptional only in that it happened in the U.S. And I will second the notion that TV is the distorter. I’ve felt a sense of difference for these 10 years I think only because my family were traveling up the coast AWAY FROM TELEVISION — hearing only face-to-face from other humans from a few days before til a few days after… until we got to Vancouver BC, where the television told us a story of world empathy with U.S. suffering… for awhile, until it was clear that we didn’t receive the empathy and understanding and solidarity.
This is an insightful piece.
It is something we all need to consider as we are responsible for the bombings. Yes we are. You see, for all those that died that gruesome ugly death, thousands upon thousands more have died at out lack of policing our political leaders. Our governments are working for us. The tax payer and consumer pays them to do just that. We as the citizens of Anglo-America have effectively given them carte-blanch to invade and murder ‘foreign’ bodies over the possibility of earning billions from there resources. These countries are ignored by our media, so the only recourse they have it to, in the end, is violence. If we stopped interfering and murdering their families, children, their old people, and working citizens this would not have happened. We the people in Anglo-America are responsible for the ‘creation’ of ‘terrorists’. We make them. They do not make themselves. Again, without our interference and theft of their resources this terrorist machine would not have been created. Now think about that.
You know, I’m still thinking about this piece, and I don’t want to go off topic, as I usually do. Once again, you touch upon something of great importance, yet as a human being, I also know first and foremost what really matters to me, bar nothing, are those things and peoples who are closest in thought and heart.
My first responses to the 9/11 attacks were directed toward my son as I watched the towers come down. The son who was supposed to be there was my first concern. Once I learned his appointment had been rescheduled and he was safe, it was only then I thought about others…. and I don’t apologize for my thinking. I was afraid for my kid – plain and simple.
This is the way humanity is built. We think first of self and loved ones then assuming all is well with them, we think about others, the ones not known or cared about in a personal way. And, we all want to be proud members of our society. A society that is safe by our definitions of what safe and secure mean. For some, omnipotence means safe from harm. But always, it is fear that drives the safety issue. Then we tell the stories, the brave stories….those that counter our secret fears.
The truth is that our leaders and news media are a direct reflection of who we are as a country and how many of us think and feel. Tip O’Neil was right; it is much easier to think locally than to think globally. Thinking we are blameless is immature, yet comforting for many. If we really want to make changes in the world, we have to broaden our worldview, and our leader’s stewardship of our country.
First it begins with articles like this one. Articles like this promote thoughtful reflection on our humanity and what we are willing to do for others, however difficult it might be. The first step, as we all know, is to take action, not pat ourselves on the back at how mature and superior we are in our thinking.
you have, with no force but the force of the writers gift, opened my mind, expanded my view, extracted the root of emotional discord I’ve long felt about this horrific event. I am humbled and enlightened. well done, sir.
Thank you for this brave piece, which does not disrespect the dead but places the event perfectly in the context of what it has done to America.
Hey Nick, nobody’s saying you can’t mourn the loss of your dad’s friend. At all. I may be misreading your note, but it sounds like you’re actually angry, or resentful. I’m genuinely curious why? Also, for the record, my piece refers to 9/11 as a “mass murder.”
This really resonates with my thinking that we have willingly victimized ourselves in the aftermath and given up far more “freedom” in the name of “protecting” it, than we have won for anyone, Iraq, Afgan, or American. What we really want is a world of carte blanche for Americans and we cannot grasp that not everyone looks at our lives with envy.
In your article, you kept repeating “we”. I can understand why you have written about your own ideology the use of “we” as if you can speak for all of Americans Is extraordinary. The words “narcisstic, magical thinking, celestial being, our imperial luxuries”….what I learned and still believe is that America is a great nation..with so many loving, compassionate people who turn to a greater being over themselves. I’m sorry you can’t see this. I watched the fireman walk into the buildings, people giving their lives to help others. I know what it feels like to lose everything…to lose a son. The mom’s and Dad’s who lost their children that day are no less deserving of our compassion than the mom who loses her starving child. We are all God’s children…none of us are perfect but we can strive to be better, to be kinder…to love others as ourselves. May God Bless you and May God bless America!
Steve, I felt a little angry when I finished reading this the first time– not a bad thing, of course. After reading it a few more times, I see the subtlety of some of your arguments and am grateful for its tone. Still, I hope you don’t mind if I raise a few objections.
I did not know anyone who died as a result of the attacks that day either. But I don’t think that knowing one of the nearly 3000 is qualification for grief, for mourning. These were not deaths due to disease or other natural disaster. They were result of years of planning a series of actions designed to kill the largest number of people (and there were non-Americans among the dead)in the most public, painful way possible. It was deeply personal. It was also broadly cultural. Grief and mourning exist on this personal-public continuum as well, no?
You wrote of visiting a friend who made a statement about dropping bombs on the perpetrators, adding “because they harmed his sense of omnipotence.” I don’t think I know your friend, so I’m generalizing here, but what I sensed among the people in my circle was the loss of the sense of protection rather than omniscience. What thinking, sensitive American circa 2000 did not have an inkling of “Boy have we been inordinately lucky as a nation. Our homes are rising in value, our food is cheap, our stock market is booming. When is the other shoe going to drop? What is the dark side of cheap airfare and instant global access to information?” I remember thinking “Wow, Israel has crazy amounts of security when you fly into their airports.” I remember feeling very lucky to take my family to Europe a few times– something no one in my family ever thought they’d be able to do– and noticing how small and close those countries were to each other. I never felt omniscient. I felt lucky. And luck has a way of turning.
Ten years ago I realized that we’d come to the end of our *sense* that America’s wealth and geographic distance were protecting it. But we were never omniscient– not as individuals and not as a nation.
I do take issue with your use of the Freudian concept of infantile omniscience– which was meant to describe the individual child’s inner state– as a cultural phenomenon. It’s a complicated theory to begin with, based on the relationship with two parents, and simply doesn’t translate to culture in a way that moves our understanding of human life forward.
Yes, those of us who were fortunate enough to experience the terror attacks that day *not* from lower Manhattan,the seat of a plane, or the 104th floor of the World Trade Center watched the coverage on television. How extraordinary to be able to see, and revisit, these events as soon as they occurred, rather than hearing about them months or years later? The television was the medium through which the news was delivered. The shock, anger, numbness and the rest– the feelings– could one argue that they were any different than the reaction of any person to mass violence?
I agree that some Americans– notably politicians– used the terror attacks (as well as the public’s sense of numbness and terror that accompanies any sudden trauma) as a means to frame their “sadistic urges into moral duties.” Yes! But you paint with too broad a brush and too vehement a stroke on this point. What the attacks that day did to us individually and as a nation are more varied and more subtle. They shift and evolve.And ten years is not long enough to label these effects concrete.
I’m grateful for essays like yours, which undoubtedly will enter the transcript, so to speak, and touch on difficult subjects. Grateful, too, for the ability to reply.
If we try to understand the thinking behind the desperate action of mass murder it will help the public to lobby against our governments in the slaughter of innocent families much like our own. Just as the people went to work in New York, so did the people in Afghanistan. We are the same effectively. We love our families. We never consciously wish to mass murder anybody despite the media’s efforts to try and jade our thinking for mass political control. Nobody wants there children to die, they have love amongst themselves and it is unnatural to think otherwise, because we would not have to wait for mass murders to do the murdering. We’d be for vigilantism and our laws would change accordingly to allow for such cold hearted and misplaced ‘justice’.
Being English, I think of the Irish. How the British left thousands upon thousands to die of the potato famine, when the channel crossing to the people was less than a day away. Nobody cared. With this in view, and the Irish fight for independence, it makes sense. When London suffered the bombings from the Irish it was due to the English not listening. British policies and law were stifling the people but again we just ignored them. We have to think what our countries would do if the boot was on the other foot. Don’t forget, these are human beings pushed to the limits of survival. I am not in agreement of terrorist acts, it is that I can see how powerful a tool desperation is -it leads to mass murder, but importantly, so too, does nations of cold hearts. Indifference and lack of accountability are the tools of igniting violence and murder in whole nations of people who are victims of pain and suffering, not for a couple of years but for decades, and more.
Thank you for this article. You so clearly articulated what I’ve been struggling to communicate with people regarding my feelings about 9/11 and the anniversary of 9/11.
I’d be surprised if an all-seeing compassionate being in the heavens would simply equate dying of old age to murder, & simply tot it up as the day’s statistics.
One can bemoan the excesses of the mass media & the national narcissism they encourage. One can also recognize that an extremist movement has declared war on the West and carries it out by means of mass murder. The West in turn is not innocent; in fact the West is caught up in a centuries-long web of industrialized war and national rivalries; but one wrong does not excuse another. Do you fault western governments for attempting to protect their populations from horrific terrorist attacks? They aren’t perfect, obviously (the governments); neither are we.
Well written and thought provoking.
But I remember a totally different mourning when it occurred. It wasn’t that America was attacked or that the buildings had fallen, it was a general sadness that some response was going to happen, and the response would lead to even more loss of life.
I don’t think I was alone I’m that thought. I’d even venture to guess this feeling even pervaded the leaders of the countries who responded.
Henry,
I don’t fault governments for trying to protect their own, but I do fault them for not being more inward-looking and for failing to consider what they can do in terms of changing their policies toward the rest of the world so that people are less likely to want to attack us. Instead, our only response as a nation was to return violence for violence, and anyone who dared suggest that maybe we’d given people in the Middle East a reason to be upset was called a “blame America firster” and was tossed out of the public discourse.
There is no real division between East and West, we just wear different hats. 99.9% of humanity belongs to a single culture now. That culture wages war everywhere, on everything, because we believe that we know the right way to live. We suffer at our own hands and project the blame onto the flavor of the week to justify a new declaration of war.
The war against drugs…
The war against cancer…
The war against poverty…
The war against terrorism…
We are NOT humanity, but we may be the end of it unless changed minds envision something beyond civilization and the age of empire.
Infantile omnipotence. Not omniscience. Big difference.
beautiful. thanks.
“The story of 9/11, the grand fiction we constructed as a culture in the days and months and years afterward, ran something like this:
A band of religious psychopaths, acting without rational motive, murdered the innocence of a proud and blameless nation. Slowly, heroically, that brave nation dug out from the rubble and exacted revenge.
It was a story bled dry of doubt or nuance, a piece of propaganda. It divided the world along the fault-line of the zealot. America had been wronged and therefore could do no wrong.”
Let’s not forget that this also is another summary, another fiction. It’s fairly easy, from whatever academic loft or arts program one inhabits, to criticize the “mass response” of the body politic, and to present oneself as an all-seeing compassionate celestial being, so much more refined, more attuned to the the moral complexities than those grubby politicians we elected, or those greedy newshounds, spinning melodramas… It makes for good philosophical copy…
It becomes more difficult, though, I would guess, if one is actually responsible for “national security” – fireman, cop, government official – & threats of further attacks (NYC, Pentagon, White House…) are still out there, from “stateless actors” dedicated to our downfall, and supported by lots of covert funding from obscure oil magnates in Saudi Arabia… Bu I’m sure there is some way to spin this to make ourselves look morally superior…
I agree with you that propaganda and false narrative has sprung up around these attacks. I agree with you that America is not blameless. For what it’s worth, I think it’s sick how Bush manipulated this country using emotion surrounding 9/11.
But you tread very close to telling people how they should feel. 9/11 makes me sad. Yes, sadder than other tragedies that are less close to home (although those make me sad too). Yes, sad partially because of the loss of control, safety, and security.
But I think it’s pretty normal to feel that way. Pretty human, if you ask me.
I think you’ve missed it.
Of course, the AM radio characterization of the attacks is wrong, borders on propaganda, etc. But I don’t know anyone who accepted that. For you to suggest that 9-11 and its aftermath led to a decade of magical thinking is to ignore that fact that the US was already polarized, divided, and in some cases, as a 1950’s novel suggests, “A Nation of Sheep”.
Also, please review the facts, For example, recall that ~372 of those who were killed that day were not US citizens, but foreign nationals. Friends of those people, and citizens of other countries who lost loved ones felt the same terrible and personal loss as did those of us who are US citizens. Thanks
Thanks Steve for giving voice to what so many of us have been feeling but been afraid to utter to the world at large. When Osama Bin Laden’s death was reported, the propaganda machine revved up yet again, using his death to reinvigorate that misplaced “American pride.” On this, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I hope people will take the time to reflect on your words. For what it’s worth it meant a lot to me to read them.
Thank you for your piece. There is a lot of interesting, good thinking in it I believe. One thing is not true I think, and that is where you write that ´Nobody stood up´. I am not American, but I remember Noam Chomsky standing up and pointing out the obvious, and I recon there were more, even though they were a minority, especially in the beginning.
When you write in black and white, like you are the first person to point this out, you sort of also write in a simplified moral way. That´s the only thing I don´t like about your piece.
Henry Gould,
Ooops. Sorry. A note to Henry Gould: The folks actually “responsible for national security” were the ones who ignored clear evidence of Bin Laden and Al Qeada. They did so because they believed in the myth of American omnipotence. Read, if you haven’t, Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower.” No myths in that book, just the relevant historical background.
Thanks, Steve. Beautifully and bravely articulated.
Dwight: You’re right about the word. Steve used “omnipotence”, not “omniscience.” My opinion doesn’t change though– it’s a Freudian concept meant to apply to individuals, not cultures. It sounds sexy though. I wish writers would resist the temptation to psychoanalyze culture in this way.
Wondering why Dwight’s post links back to Steve Almond’s site.
Dwight Says:
September 10th, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Infantile omnipotence. Not omniscience. Big difference.
http://stevenalmond.com/
BRAVO! Well said, and well done.
Regarding Steve’s lamentation about the attention we’re paying for the ten year anniversary on the 9//11 attacks, we can say the same for the amount of attention that was paid to the murders of John Kennedy, John Lennon and even the untimely death of Princess Diana. We watched those tributes on television and mourned in similar ways we’re thinking about 9/11 today. We were all connected; we all remember what we were doing on those days.
Our memories and the corresponding impact of those events stay with us and become part of our individual stories, those that make us who we are. There is no story in watching the spectacle, but the ‘meaning’ each viewer extracts from it and then shares with others is what makes our stories matter, if only to ourselves. Our stories change us to be sure, but each change is individual and unfortunately, not necessarily toward that of a higher nature.
To end the warring and mindset of who’s to blame for the terrorism here and in other places around the world, all the U.S. has to do to stop the continued bloodletting, is simply to stop supporting Israel’s right to exist. Pull out. Let them fend for themselves. So, should we really be thinking like Neville Chamberlain? Appease the attackers, exert courage in the face of danger or turn the other cheek – which way to go? In certain instances, appeasement or compassion just don’t work.
The US does all it can to ensure that Israel remains as a country and as a people. Because of that simple choice, either Israel’s freedom to exist or its annihilation, certain Arab nations have consciously chosen to destroy America and what it stands for in the world – either a bountiful ray of hope for life or a greedy, imperialistic power needing to be destroyed.
Ultimately we will let 9/11 pass into history as WWII and other wars have done, but for now, it is still a very painful memory in our recent past. Because of an act of terrorism that killed almost three thousand innocent people, media hype and national attention will be paid, like it or not.
Well over here on the Left Coast, I’m reasonably sure that several progressive liberals on KPFA “stood up” and made “the obvious point that millions of people in other parts of the world live in a state of perpetual danger etc.” and that we, as a country, had finally joined the globe. It’s not hard to imagine that “no one” in mainstream Republicrat America “stood up”, but I live near Berkeley and plenty of liberals expressed what “no one” expressed in your neighborhood.
Furthermore, there is the deeper political narrative that “a band of religious psychopaths, funded by secret central intelligence sociopaths, acted with zealotry and amazing timing to elude NORAD, to defy the phsyics of steel-framed-buildings melting & collapsing at the burn temperature of jet fuel, to collapse WTC Bldg 7 which was never hit, in order to bruise a proud nation and allow a different elite group of religious psychopaths to impose US military might in a fossil fuel rich area of the planet and squander the good will most of that planet felt on 9/12/01.” Just sayin’…
Good piece otherwise. Thanks for stimulating my thoughts and emotions!
I had too much to say than would fit in a comment, so, please see this:
http://blog.laurayan.com/2011/09/911-mem.html
Esp: I wonder. Maybe there aren’t so many other essays that take this perspective, not because others haven’t thought similar criticisms, not because they are too scared of judgment, but because 9/11 is a sacred occasion. One that makes it possible to, however fleetingly, share a moment of warmth, of grief and love and pain and forgiveness, of a unity rarely possible elsewhere. Maybe it’s best that this date should be focused solely on America, should be allowed to be bitterly, truthfully narcissistic. Maybe this is the one date that Americans shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about the hunger and war and poverty of the rest of the world. Maybe this is an opportunity to show the compassion that Almond so calls for, in exactly the way that he dismisses, by, yes, writing about watching television.
I’m a native New Yorker and have been here all along. I know people who were part of that day and were to one degree or another, were traumatized. I don’t associate the 3000 killed in that wonton attack (some still dying) to be related in the least to the war in Afghanistan or, especially, the war in Iraq. My sense in talking to people who were downtown that day, or who know people who were downtown that day, think about anything but the horror they were all part of. 3000 killed, their families & friends, all of the aid workers be they 1st, 2nd, or last responders. all the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors who saw this happening before their disbelieving eyes, and all THEIR family & friends & coworkers, adds up to at least that many people.
Add to that people who saw the towers from a distance from Hoboken or Brooklyn or further away. This unimaginable nightmare effected all of us here, especially.
It was a very, very large, traumatic day.
People grieve in their own different ways. Many 911 families want nothing to do with these memorials. On the other hand there’s the half a million living here for whom the attacks, the bravery shown and risks taken by any and all rescuers, who were seared by this tragedy and always will be.
Add to that people like me who are merely neighbors — people who’d merely passed by or through those buildings, for whom they were just barely a part of the backdrop of NYC. (I don’t know anyone who sees a place they’ve visited or know pop up on TV who doesn’t say “oh! I was there once!)
So what we have in NYC is a ritual memorial of something that happened TO US as a community. This, as you note, is something people need. It happened here, most living then are still here and still have pained feelings about 9/11/01. And I can tell you from personal experience, there is, for whatever reason, a special resonance to the anniversaries of deaths of loved ones, especially the ‘big’ numbers like ten.
I myself have never paid much attention to the annual 911 events, but I understand the need a very great number of New York-area people have for those memorials. (I do look for plaques and memorials when I pass firehouses and police stations & feel sad.)
Whatever ‘misuse’ the call to arms the World Trade Center attacks were used for is to most people here unrelated to the event itself. I believe you’re wrong about the memorials being some kind of show or tribute to ‘American Exceptionalism.’
Of course, that doesn’t apply to everyone. But in terms of percentages what I say is overwhelmingly so in NYC and environs.
Nearly everyone accepted some kind of military response and was glad of it. Now, the degree and purposes and extent of it is a totally different matter. And almost everyone NOW understands that the Iraq had nothing to do with it at all, and understand that if it wasn’t for that deadly mischief, catching and controlling the Afghan-based parties responsible would have been long over.
I never liked those towers much. Discounting the method of their removal (if thats possible) I was glad enough they’re gone. I disagreed with a memorial of that size (there should be something substantial for WWII here). I thought building a new 100 story skyscraper there was stupid. The watered-down version of the original design looks banal. The plans were as much Babbittry as anything to do with memory or ‘Imperialism’.
But, ok. I lost that argument. I’m long over it, and the City can use the tourist bucks.
And yes, in the long run we’re all dead & forgotten. But if that’s your measuring stick for a memorial you must have the same attitude about everything you think or do. I have no answer for you there. (I did attend the Triangle Fire 100th anniversary memorial & rally, even though a 1000th year anniversary is unlikely. It was attended by some elderly folks who personally new victims of that tragedy).
Just to make sure you understand, I am worried about the National Security State, my privacy, the $billions wasted that could be put to other use. I’m concerned about the billionaire-bought-and-paid-for legal system being promulgated. I’m more worried about Planet Frying. So I’m pretty much in the Progressive camp.
However, another thing that bothers me is people, right and left, who see 2D when the world is 3D. Not everyone in the Pentagon or the CIA or who runs a company or votes Republican is believes in, or is engaged in (in their hearts) American Imperialism, or exceptionalism (though in some ways we ARE exceptional). You and I are Americans, too. Everyone you see on the street isn’t walking around thinking that stuff.
Blackbird,
If I understand the article correctly, it is not the the feeling of grief that is questioned, but the nations response to that grief. I recall thinking on the day, that th USA would now throw their toys out of the pram, with no thought that what they suffered was no worse than the horrors they have imposed on other all over the globe. The world has been paying for this tantrum ever since, in the form of the loss of basic human rights.
Thank you.
I’m a firefighter and also an EMT.
I guess that gets me into the conversation.
I also taught Ethics at UConn for 12 years.
I just want to say that as we rightly wring our hands at how we’ve responded to these attacks, we have to remember that people that we loved were killed. People lost there lives trying to rescue their fellows without asking after their religion or country of origin.
It’s not hard to lose sight of the bigger picture when you know that your child has been crushed under the weight of the south tower.
it will do no good to dismiss the hatred that we find here as parochial. We should embrace it, do our best to understand it as natural, unavoidable. And then perhaps when we can take a breath, try one more time to understand each other.
If there is a God,that god’s one great gift to us is free will: we are thereby responsible for our triumphs, but we have only ourselves to blame when we fuck everything up royally.
I remain optimistic.
The premise in the piece is ‘why obsess about these 3000 deaths more than any other’?
That’s how the author starts it out. He’s framing what he thinks my reaction should be.
I’m saying, ‘no, this was personal’.
Have you ever suffered the loss of a loved one? Especially the sudden and unexpected loss? This has happened to me twice.
Have you ever been the FRIEND of someone who suffered such a loss? You become a part of it?
Have you ever witnessed an accident, especially a fatal one? A fire, whatever.
You are not thinking about the loss of a hungry child halfway around the world. Or the transgressions your (or anyone’s) country?
No, of course not. You don’t. He’s wrong.
If the writer feels differently, I can’t help THAT. But he can’t tell me how to feel either. And I feel he’s obsessed and screwed up.
And ten years later, on the anniversary of your loss or other traumatic event. Well, personally speaking, I’ve found that as much as I tried to prepare myself for those big anniversaries, it didn’t help. I’d feel upset, helpless. or otherwise like crap.
In the case of death and destruction on this scale, in your city – or our country for that matter (as with, say, the Challenger accident) it touches personal cords. In the case of 9/11 the sense of community horror and grieving WAS genuine and WAS personal. Even just thinking of people calling me from around the country asking if me – 10 miles away in Queens – was OK, with great concern, is touching and added to the sense of a shared community.
I’m was just saying that this guy’s attempt to delegitimatize MY feelings and those of just about 99% of the rest of the people around here that day are as much of an imposition as if I imposed mine on his.
And he’s done that in a public forum, so I felt I had to respond. .’
So again, ON the 10th anniversary – even in retrospect, most of us are going to think about where we were, where our friends, co-workers, etc were and their stories, and will think about the unknowns slaughtered essentially in front of our eyes, – which was any eyes of anyone anywhere near there, or any countryman watching a tv anxiously 500, 1000, 3000 miles away
TODAY, 9/11/11 is NOT the day for soapbox political science.
I was moved by this. Thanks. It’s normal to respond with more grief and shock to something that hits close to home. We don’t need to be ashamed about that in the moment. All the way over here on the west coast, but married to a New Yorker with family in Manhattan, I remember being afraid – First, are they OK? But, then, would the US government start WWIII? Were we going to face nuclear attacks? Were antiwar activists like me going to be rounded up and put in concentration camps? Maybe sounds like silly paranoia now, but those were my first thoughts after momentary disbelief and fear for my family. I also thought the “chickens have come home to roost” and now US Americans finally get to experience what “we” have been doing to others, some of it on that very same day. And, I was moved by the heroism and kindness with which many responded. You feel whatever you feel in those first moments of shock – it’s not wrong, even anger and rage and a momentary desire to drop bombs on people – it’s what you do with your feelings after that counts. Our government has done the wrong things and, overall, we, as the people living under that government, have not responded effectively to stop them. Some of us have been narcissists and voyeurs – Steve is right. Others have become more racist, Islamaphobic, xenophobic, even fascistic. That has had political consequences, to the millions “we” have murdered since 9-11 and to ourselves as we lose rights, benefits, jobs, and houses.
Thank you for saying this; very brave. I lost so many friends by discussing my real opinions on 9/11 that I eventually just gave up.
One of my big issues with the pious hysteria surrounding 9/11 is the persistent business of “everything changed that day” and “nothing will ever be the same.” It’s so incredibly ahistorical. Lots changed on 9/11/01 in America; lots changed on 9/11/73 when American proxies assassinated the elected leader of Chile. Lots changed after the Bhopol disaster in India, when tons of multinational corporate toxic waste poisoned a generation of Indian children. Lots changed in eastern europe between 1932 and 1934, when tens of millions of Russians and Ukranians died in the collectivization famine – intentionally and purposely starved to death as a matter of political policy. Nothing was quite the same after 1939-1945, when millions of Jews were slaughtered in cold blood and two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian populations in Japan. Lots changes lots, practically every day, in the ever-shifting spectrum of human history. To set aside this admittedly tragic but relatively minor event and say it “changed everything” demonstrates a kind of semi-hysterical self-dramatization that is only possible in an anomalously tragedy-free country during a remarkably tragedy-free half-century.
Interesting article that highlights the magical thinking on both sides of what seems to me to be a religious argument. They kill us for their god so we can kill them for ours, Love that old time religion.
thank you.
The 9/11 mass media blanket coverage was there NOT because of any sensitivity to the deaths of innocent victims per se (otherwise the news would be full of stories of people starving to death, being persecuted to death, and being bombed/ shot to death every single night).
The blanket coverage was there to update our original programming on 9/11. It was there to update our fears and anxieties (to refresh our terror) and to program a whole new generation not old enough (or simply not born) 10 years ago with the same terror programming we were all subjected to.
The blanket coverage was there to do something else too. It was there to make us feel absolutely stuffed full of information about 9/11, to the point where we feel we know everything there is to know about the events of that day and the subsequent 10 years.
It was there to (over) satisfy all our desires to re-explore 9/1, ten years on, yet without actually giving us the hard facts of what actually happened. Instead it concentrated only on the superficial events of the day and the EMOTIONAL aspect (the terror aspect).
The degree to which the media has filled us up with emotive tragedy/ horror stories (‘terror porn’) yet failed to get to the heart of the matter is devastatingly illustrated by the following 4 minute video which simply recounts the official documented version of events of 9/11 – something completely missing from the recent mass media 9/11 propaganda festival.
The best way we can honour the dead (and prevent any more bloodshed) is to look beyond the terror and reconnect with facts and evidence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ve thought much like this for a long time and haven’t had the courage to talk about it publicly. I wonder if we, as a nation, will have the courage in 50 or 100 years to appologize for the devastation we’ve caused in Iraq and Afganistan following 9/11.
Aloha & Mahalo (Love & Thanks). Beautifully written and quite, quite accurate. Except some people did stand up and did try to speak out against the emotional myopism. Ward Churchill, who wrote a small, heated essay “When the Chickens Come Home To Roost” was vilified, had his entire history, work record, academic contributions and personhood attacked. Contrast the national response to this tragedy with the national response to the “Bali Bombing”. The Balinese response was much more in line with what you call for, and set a great example: They asked “What did we do to set the path that resulted in this? What can we do now to avert from that path?”
Paul Krugman nailed it on his blog.
I am so happy I read this on my birthday. You made my day with this tidbit of brilliant perspective. Thank you sir.
Help me to understand the nuance of the radical failure of empathy that would lead people to fly a plane into a building full of innocent people?
Is it narcissism to be in utter shock and grieve at the persistence, in this modern age, of those whose battle cry is “convert of die?”
I don’t see the nuance in the failures of empathy that are truly psychopathic.
Simon Baron-Cohen rightly notes that evil begins with a failure of empathy. It is “magical thinking” is to believe that some belief systems are not in fact profoundly non-empathetic–and to gloss over that fact in a piece such as this.
It is “magical thinking” to, in the name or art, to fail to point to that failure of empathy and declare “Enough!”
It is “magical thinking” to, in other words, “see no evil.”
Thank you so much. I have been having trouble putting my perspective into words lately, and you completely nailed it.
I consider myself to be a true conservative, yet I appreciate this commentary and recognize its sobering truths. “Infantile omnipotence” nails it.
I have recently come to the realization that we, as a nation have been in dire need of psychoanalysis for at least the past twenty years. When the Berlin Wall fell, many of us thought that all of our battles were over. World peace and strife was finally going to come to an end. What we didn’t realize was that we had yet to face our greatest enemy: ourselves.
Americans seem to love going to battle against something. We declare war on anything we don’t like, whether it’s justified or not. We even declare war on abstractions such as poverty, drugs, and inflation. We love to fight, or at least think of ourselves as always fighting something.
Once the Soviet Union fell, we lost our common enemy. Whether we were republicans or democrats, we could all agree that the Soviets posed a clear and present danger to our way of life. So we went in search of a replacement. We thought that we had found it when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. But he was quickly dispatched and sent back home. It was too easy.
We spent the next nine years fighting with each other. The first big fight I can remember after the Gulf War were the Clarence Thomas hearings. A three-way election in ’92 deceptively divided us in ways that didn’t become clear until the Lewinsky scandal of 1998 when five years of mostly silent bitterness surfaced. The Oklahoma City bombings, Ruby Ridge, and Waco should have all provided us with clues, but we ignored them. The election of 2000 left scars with gravel embedded inside that festers even today.
9/11/2001 may have been our last opportunity to re-unite while we still had the economic power to thrive and do something positive as a response. Instead, we failed. Enemies were identified, although not clearly. Their purpose was declared–although the logic behind it baffled us. Our mission and exit strategies remain to be established even ten years later.
So we continue to fight among ourselves. A hurricane hits and we start pointing fingers at the benefit concerts. A few evil, greedy men find loopholes in our financial regulations and we spend more time finding ways to assign political blame than addressing the problems and healing the damage. An oil rig explodes and we hold the president personally responsible. An insane man shoots a congresswoman at a grocery store and we attack each other for words and phrases we uttered years earlier.
Although the timing of Paul Krugman’s comments is questionable, I was not offended by them. The terrorists did not defeat us on 9/11/2001.
Maybe the reason we haven’t had an attack since then is that they are smart enough to appreciate one of the most important rules of warfare: Never interfere with an enemy that is already busy destroying itself.
Infantile omnipotence. Self-victimization. Angry projections. Do I suffer from these? Perhaps. I do NOT suffer from sadistic urges (at least not most of the time). But that does not make me less related to those who do. Or superior to them in some way.
My sense of desire for moral perfection and my frustration at its absence (in myself and in the world around me) do not make me want to hurt others. I am sure it does make others feel this way, and I don’t judge them. We each handle our grief differently. And I know that I have actually hurt others due to my anger and frustration, in spite of my intentions.
If I suffer from infantile omnipotence or self-victimization it is not in some arrogant way. It is in a habitual, fearful way. I haven’t learned to let go and accept reality. I haven’t learned to just roll with the punches. I want to change this. I am striving to change this. It is tempting to think my humility means I am further down the path then those who speak with rage in their voices. But I doubt it. I think it merely means I am coming at the problem from a different direction.
When I see the moral imperfection that is our reality I become fearful and angry. When others see that same moral imperfection they become angry and vengeful. When still others see that same imperfection they become sad and suicidal. Still others become vigilant activists, giving their lives completely to causes (perhaps to the detriment of themselves or those they love). And on and on.
None of us sees the world completely as it is. None of us reacts perfectly to what we do see of reality. I do not judge those who feel aggressive when their sense of safety or power or morality or perfection are challenged. I only nod and say “That is their journey – I hope they find some joy on the way and some peace at the end of it.â€
WE THE PEOPLE were shocked and appalled on 9-11, and even panicked.
WE THE PEOPLE were rudely awakened to the fact that “as ye sow, so shall ye reap”.
WE THE PEOPLE were catapulted out of our assumption that ‘they’ would never come ‘here’.
WE THE PEOPLE realized that we are not safe, as long as we allow wars in our name.
WE THE PEOPLE began to realize that others make decisions and rulings for us, and WE THE PEOPLE have no say.
WE THE PEOPLE began to realize that we do have the government and the society that WE THE PEOPLE deserve.
WE THE PEOPLE began to realize the if we do not like what our government is doing, then WE THE PEOPLE must actively resist it, challenge it.
Thank you Steve for speaking my heart and mind as well.
Oh really Mr Almond?
I am not suggesting for one second that I disagree with ALL that Steve Almond has written here – but…
How innocent and pure Steve Almond seems to want us to believe HE is and would have us all think and behave the way HE would. All he is doing – but seems to be too naive to realise it – is taking advantage of his privilege (not a god-given right!) of free speech to air his high-minded views and high-sounding morality against the most powerful nation the world has ever known!
If America had been a fraction as a bad a nation as he seems to think then he for one would not have been allowed to express any such views against them. He should just try voicing such radical opinions against a few other well-deserving governments – present and past. Try the Taliban, Russians, Saudis, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, Hitler, Mussolini, etc to name but a few. These people did NOT succeed in the long run – thanks to the power of America.
Omnipotent? – No! And I do not believe for one minute that any American individual or government ever thought so. Yes – they have made mistakes and have shown that they can be over-aggressive and have sometimes supported undesirable entities – the Jews in Israel for one. But that mistake was an historic one which grew out of the ashes of WW2 and the Holocaust and worldwide sympathy for the Jews.
America was dragged into WW2 by the attack on Pearl Harbour. The world would be a very different (and worse) place today if Japan and Germany had taken over as was their intention.
And what is wrong in fighting to secure the flow of oil to the West? Although this accusation which is often levelled at the West is not necessarily justified. WW1 & WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Suez, Falklands, Panama, yes and Afghanistan! etc were nothing to do with oil!
Just to spell it out – for those people who do not seem to have any sense of historical perspective – the world would have been a far far worse place to live in than it is today, for the vast majority of its population, were America not the superpower it has been for nearly a hundred years. Large areas of Europe and Asia including Russia, Germany, Japan, China, India, and Australia have all benefited from the wealth and generosity of the US.
America has not stolen oil from any country. The countries from which much of the oil has been prospected, drilled, refined and bought, have become rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The comparisons that Mr Almond makes regarding the various reasons for deaths on that fateful day are inane and do not deserve any credibility whatsoever.
Please note Mr Almond – thia is very important because it is just one of the things you have wrong in your piece – 9/11 was not an act of war – it was a crime against humanity. A crime against people from 90 different countries not just America!
I do not believe that this terrorist act was anything to do with the Jews in Israel, or the fight against the advance of “Imperialism”. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had been supported by the US when they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan but when the Taliban started waging war on their own people (just like (Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi have done since) and the West tried to intervene – then they turned their weapons, that were provided by us, upon us.
The mere presence of an infidel soldier on the holy soil of Islamic territory (in particular Saudi Arabia – Bin Laden was a Saudi) was sufficient justification for them for any act of aggression that has occurred since that time. All the other nonsense about Israel, the West stealing their oil, etc is just propaganda and aimed at bringing the uneducated masses onto their side. Each year, the West pours millions of dollars in charities and foreign aid into the Third World. Often it goes, unknowingly, to feed Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. Many of these people have made a career out of terrorism and time and sheer weight of numbers is on their side.
We in the west have simply got to meet the challenge or be obliterated! And if that happens Mr Almond will not be able to freely express these radical views.
It is also important to state that it is almost inconceivable that any average modern day American (except maybe a few home-grown terrorists like remnants of the KKK) ever believed or expressed the notion that they were more important than others races oir had no empaty with others who had died or suffered. It goes without saying that THEIR friends and relatives ARE more important to THEM than anybody else’s friends and relatives. This is no different than saying that the friends and relatives of the Taliban are more important to THEM than anyone else’s!
It is heartening to read the views here of so many Americans who think differently and are willing to articulate their thoughts on Steve Almond’s exceptional article.
We, in the Rest of the World salute you.
‘The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr’
The Koran
Your early example oddly contradicts some of your later argument- that is
“Imagine the mother who watched her child die of hunger. Here’s this tiny person, a daughter. She has a name, a face. She doesn’t explode or fall from a skyscraper. She simply stops breathing. No cameras record her final moment, the lamentation of that mother. These images are not replayed on the television over and over and over. What would be the point of that?”
The death from starvation, while hypothetical,was with no doubt occurring somewhere, and it was a pointless tragedy. The attack was an act of calculated violence. We looked, dumbstruck. We felt threatened because we were, in fact, threatened, by religious kooks, and at the time, we had no idea how extensive or deep the action was. That we are composed at some percentage of religious kooks doesn’t stop this natural human reaction, to stare with our mouths open, in those of us who are not, in fact, religious kooks.
I cannot see Manhattan, unless I am there, without TV. If it were 1941, we would not have seen the twin towers fall until Movietone news had it at the cinema. Was the experience unreal? Careful- I am betting (and frankly, hoping) that you have never watched a child die of starvation, either, except maybe via electronic means. And yet your suffering at the imagining of a hypothetical little girl dying of starvation seemed, to me, to elicit real compassion. She was not even on TV, she was imaginary, and I felt something reading that; so why do you marvel that we who saw the towers fall on television are torn apart by that?
I identified with the people killed in 9/11, because I also went to work that day. They were my fellow citizens, and if they were ‘guilty’, or if we are all ‘guilty’ it is a guilt diluted by several hundred million, most of whom could but do not pause to think that being a cook or stockbroker marks them for death because of how a plurality of people in this country voted.
A murderous rampage for vengeance might have not been the right response, but I also did not feel “Boy, Howdy, we have been asking for it for a long time. I guess this evens things up.” I am not a celestial, perfect being. I am a human. And I was pissed off when my country, whatever that means, was attacked. I don’t say for no reason, but certainly without any good reason, and with no logical expectation that this act would make us any better, or chasten us, or reform policies. The perps knew we might react and kill innocents in our rage, but considered it worthwhile anyway. They killed citizens by deliberate plan. No cross-cultural understanding will ever make me see that as other than evil, and in need of neutralization, if not worth of punishment. They were not carried along, unwittingly, by a government whose actions are often hidden and obscure in intent, a situation for which you cannot find a counterexample in history. They were at least more guilty than those they killed.
One last thought- if our actions or inactions here create terrorists there, can their actions here cause us to unleash hell on others? If not, are they without will, and freedom to act, and thus not as blameworthy? Do only those in representative democracies bear full burden for not only their own but all of their governments acts?
Is virtue a function of size and power? Destructiveness is, dangerousness is. But is right and wrong? Perhaps art should also examine the fact that being poor, oppressed, or weak does not automatically confer virtue, or perfect foresight, or righteousness, and evil can bloom in the heart of the people, the proletariat, the downtrodden as well as some dumbass in a skyscraper trying to make a living.
To UK Observer and others. I would like to point out that I too am both from and live in the UK but that I shall forever be grateful to the governments and citizens of the US for rescuing Europe and the rest of the world from tyranny in two great (world) wars and on other occasions since. It needs, I believe, the application of an historical and moral perspective to look at how we arrived where we are today.
In my humble opinion (I do not belong to any political or religious organisation) the UK were often guilty of tyranny during its empire days but following the US lead we are now, relatively, a far more compassionate nation (in principle if not always in practise) towards others. There are obviously many counter-arguments to this which everyone will be aware!
I have not heard of the Taliban donating millions of dollars to rebuild nations wrecked by extremism and ideology. Germany and Japan are two examples. America and other western nations have sent millions of dollars in medical and financial aid to Pakistan in the aftermath of flooding there. We could have said – “as long as you harbour Taliban and Al Qaeda forces … etc etc”. Meantime, the US has itself suffered tremendous damage from tropical storms and hurricanes. Who is going to their help?
In Bosnia, we saw an example where the West stepped in to prevent further blood-letting on both sides (by people who called themselves Christians and Muslims). I do not believe that there has been any gratitude – from either side – shown for what was and is now being achieved there.
In Northern Ireland two opposite sides – both calling themselves Christian – killed and maimed thousands of innocent people in the name of their “causes”. It has always struck me as odd that perpetrators of these acts of violence often do so in to avenge some other less or equally violent act against them. Christians are meant to “love their enemies and turn the other cheek”. It is the Jews who are taught “an eye for an eye” etc. But I doubt very much either, whether the Qoran says anything about crashing airliners into the Trade Centre and killing thousands of innocents. No doubt someone will enlighten me on these ideologically conflicting matters.
And now we have the “Arab Spring” uprising. Muslims killing Muslims (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain etc . Does it not seem to be case, everywhere, that an lot of people are just looking for any excuse they can to murder, rape, pillage, loot, destroy anything that gets in their way – but that is OK because if you say your prayers then God is on your side????!!!!.
I do not claim to know the answers to these problems – or at least answers that would be acceptable to all sides – but it does seem to me (as naive as it sounds)that if these factions (governments and individuals) were to put into practise what they claim to believe – then the world could and would be a safer place for all. We should not be holding our breath in the meantime though!!
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P.S. I should apologise for my many typos towards the end of my previous piece – due to tiredness and stress. It was remiss of me as I hate that and there is no excuse now as we all have spell and grammar checkers.
Wonderful article, thank you.
Anything that happens in America and especially to Americans can get the almighty lens of the western media focused on it. But let’s transport the twin towers to Iraq and say more than 3,000 American lives were lost.
Would that event carry the same weight? I suspect not.
It wasn’t so much that 2,977 American’s died. It was because they died in an attack on American soil in the most prominent US city, no less. I would say it’s more about the war is hell syndrome of Mr. Sherman at work here.
Up until now we have had our soldiers do the dying and in far away “Over There” places. We can stomach that just fine, right? Remember what Dalton T said back in the day, “Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast.”
I would think this human habit of being ok with death “over there” but not ok with it “here” would be the most baffling of all to any compassionate celestial being.
Couldn’t agree with you more, Mr. Barrow!
So, you wake up in the morning, make coffee, turn on the television. It’s Rocky Mountain Time, so the thing’s been going on for a while. Coffee burns while you watch the whole damn thing, have a flashback to some story you wrote for English Comp in college in the seventies, a cynical, satrical piece about going home to watch the revolution on the six o’clock news. You remember how you saw the news at eleven not very long afterward, film clips from shoulder cams from earlier that day … the LAPD fighting the SLA in the ghetto, bullets flying, tear gas, screams … you watched the house burn down with the SLA inside, thought, “Damn. I just saw the revolution on the six o’clock news.”
But here you are some decades later watching the towers collapse, first one, then the other…
Yes, ‘you’ is me and I’ll admit that when I saw this happen, I wanted bombs to rain like frogs on somebody. Didn’t know who. Didn’t much care. Figured we’d find out and go clean their clocks. It’s the human condition. An emotional response. As is the myth of involvement. “I saw it on TV, so I was there, damn it.” But, no, I was’nt. I was in Arizona.
Bombs did fall on Baghdad. Watched that too. Shocked and awed, I was. Only thing is, I’m not Toby Keith playing guitar and singing about eagles and boots and the red, white and blue. I’m this guy in Arizona who’s been to a war and who has a kid who’s old enough to join the Marines and I know he’s out of work. So I call, let him know that there’s better things to do than to go to a war.
Ten years of magical thinking is a high concept, but it’s also a reality, one that’s spawned and enabled unbelievable hype while most of us got impoverished while the Cheneys and the Bushes and the other enablers made millionaires into billionaires through war profiteering and globalized corporate structures that leap tall law structures in a single bound, laughing all the way.
Mr. Almond, what you’ve said here is hard to read, especially if the reader is honest with his or herself. It’s difficult to accept, but should be required reading for everyone. Everyone.
Well said James. The truth is that we create our reality, not with only our conscious thoughts but our unconscious ones and our emotions as well. Personal responsibility is critical, and we have been totally out of the habit for far too long.
I am responding to Gordon MacKay’s response-It has been my experience that if you give it away free, it will not be appreciated. and would be ignored.Don’t know why, just is….
I DONT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH seeing 9/11 in context–as a horrible historical mass murder by muslim terrorists..
What I do have a problem with is with people who someone think the actual individuals that died deserve more sorrow than all the others that died unexpectedly that day or year.
These are the people who decide what to care about because they really dont give much thought to others who are suffering. If its a pretty girl(Natalie Holloway) they decide to pour all their feelings into that. If she’s fat and ugly–they dont blink an eye.
It sentimentalism and its fake. No other way is this displayed more by making the families all millionaires through donations. Use your heads people and help those who need it.
THE OTHER HORROR is these conspiracy nuts acting as if Bush and Cheney, who dont even have much longer to live, and are both wealthy, started a war to make money. This kind of sick depraved thinking is fit for infants who minds are so sinful all they can do is project their own inner wickedness upon others. Your dont agree with their policies so they’re murderers—ok..we get it–your irrational…so irrational you cant even keep nonsense like that to your own dysfunctional mind…you must do the devils work for him and corrupt other with your agenda.
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