I didn't write about the anniversary of 9/11 yesterday because I didn't know what to say. I've watched for five years as our politicians (on both goddamn sides of the aisle) turn this event into a political battlefield; both sides have held up widows and widowers as pawns in their games, and it's sickening and disheartening.
9/11 was a tragedy, yes. But part of that tragedy has been our inability to process that tragedy and make the outcome of that positive. 9/11 should have forced us to confront our place in the world. It should have helped us understand that we are a part of the world, the world that lives with machine guns outside of synagogues (Rome). The world that fears bombs in the Tube (London) or suicide bombers on busses (Israel). It should have brought us to greater understanding of the other parts of the world that live like this all. the. time. But instead of becoming more global in our thinking, we've paved the maverick's way, the way that says we can kick all their asses.
We can't. There's really nothing ever that can stop a man getting on a bus with a bomb strapped to him. 9/11 shouldn't be about making the world safer, though it's a noble goal, and I do think that special attention needs to be paid to those fundamentalists (of any stripe) that would use violence to impose their will on the rest of the world. (But wait. Haven't we become that fundamentalist? That's another story; we can't be safer if we are just like them, if we decide to use bombs and guns and torture to stop them from doing the same thing.) But whatever lessons could have come out of that horrible day in September of 2001 just haven't seemed to.
I don't know how to say this any differently. I don't know how to express my frustration that our government has kept this public in a permanent state of panic about terrorism. Things are simply out of our control, and no amount of guns or bombs will bring those things under our control. Instead of having a terror alert color chart, we should simply live aware that these things happen. That it's a situation that has been omnipresent in many societies the world over for years and years. That we've been lucky, and stupid to think that it wouldn't touch us. But someone has scared us into thinking that we need to beat up the whole world, like a big bully. Bullies never win; they always lose by provoking mentally the victims. That's us. We're going to lose, ideologically, if we don't radically reassess.
But this is about 9/11. We should remember 9/11; we should think to where we were and what we were doing that day five years ago. We should remember that as the day we truly entered the environment the rest of the world has been living in. We should remember that day as the day we could have become a better country, a better place to live.
But we've gone another way. And it's almost too sad to bear.
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