Five Years Later
Worth watching: Keith Olbermann's courageous and solemnly outraged rejection of Bush's patronizing 9/11 drivel, delivered Monday evening live on MSNBC. Find it here.
Human beings died in the 9/11 attacks. Grief is an appropriate response. As with death under any other circumstances, the lives of family and friends will never be the same.
But 5 years later, it's still 9/11 for much of the rest of American society. Why? What did we lose besides our naive presumption that we as a nation are exempt from the patterns of human history (which migh just include the inconvenient possibility of suffering and even judgment)? Our self-righteous sense of entitlement to trouble-free lives was bruised and we want blood. We speak in wide-eyed horror at the imminent danger to all Americans should our world police state relent for a moment, then faithfully go about our patriotic duties of frequenting the mall and filling our gas tanks, wallowing in self-pity about inconvenience in airports. How would we cope if we actually had to live with war every day?
Grief is not new to this tired old world. 9/11 was hardly the first or the worst tragedy to befall the human race. Where is our perspective? Where is our compassion? Where is it written that the lives of Americans are more precious than that of anyone from any other nation? Every day, children around the world starve to death in numbers ten times that of the total casualties of 9/11. Every day. (I hear starvation is a rough way to go. A plane crash or suffocation in rubble would be mercifully quick by comparison.) Probably by now 100 times as many Iraqi civilians have perished since 9/11 due to indiscriminate military tactics used by the American armed forces (including the use of land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium, all of which are human rights violations according to international law) and due to the shortages of food, clean water, and medicine caused by war and economic sanctions.
The 9/11 terrorists attacked our nation's most prominent temple of Mammon and the cathedral of Might-Makes-Right. They did not (as the American military often does) kill families in their beds in the middle of the night and reduce whole neighborhoods and cities to rubble. They caused no one to starve or die of treatable diseases. They rendered no one homeless. They did nothing to blaspheme Christianity's God. They hit us where it really hurts - in the symbols of the economic and military dominion in which our nation puts its trust.
Repentance, too, is an appropriate response to 9/11. As is shame for what the citizens of this nation by our complacent silence have allowed to happen in the aftermath.
Human beings died in the 9/11 attacks. Grief is an appropriate response. As with death under any other circumstances, the lives of family and friends will never be the same.
But 5 years later, it's still 9/11 for much of the rest of American society. Why? What did we lose besides our naive presumption that we as a nation are exempt from the patterns of human history (which migh just include the inconvenient possibility of suffering and even judgment)? Our self-righteous sense of entitlement to trouble-free lives was bruised and we want blood. We speak in wide-eyed horror at the imminent danger to all Americans should our world police state relent for a moment, then faithfully go about our patriotic duties of frequenting the mall and filling our gas tanks, wallowing in self-pity about inconvenience in airports. How would we cope if we actually had to live with war every day?
Grief is not new to this tired old world. 9/11 was hardly the first or the worst tragedy to befall the human race. Where is our perspective? Where is our compassion? Where is it written that the lives of Americans are more precious than that of anyone from any other nation? Every day, children around the world starve to death in numbers ten times that of the total casualties of 9/11. Every day. (I hear starvation is a rough way to go. A plane crash or suffocation in rubble would be mercifully quick by comparison.) Probably by now 100 times as many Iraqi civilians have perished since 9/11 due to indiscriminate military tactics used by the American armed forces (including the use of land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium, all of which are human rights violations according to international law) and due to the shortages of food, clean water, and medicine caused by war and economic sanctions.
The 9/11 terrorists attacked our nation's most prominent temple of Mammon and the cathedral of Might-Makes-Right. They did not (as the American military often does) kill families in their beds in the middle of the night and reduce whole neighborhoods and cities to rubble. They caused no one to starve or die of treatable diseases. They rendered no one homeless. They did nothing to blaspheme Christianity's God. They hit us where it really hurts - in the symbols of the economic and military dominion in which our nation puts its trust.
Repentance, too, is an appropriate response to 9/11. As is shame for what the citizens of this nation by our complacent silence have allowed to happen in the aftermath.
posted by Ingrid at 2:07 PM
4 Comments:
Ingrid,
Excellent post . . .I love your insight and sensitivity. Good thinking, friend.
On a more shallow note, what is your last initial? I'd like to post you as a link on my blog.
Hope you're well,
Kristy
J. And thank you - I'm honored.
I haven't heard back from Franshonn. If you want to find me when you're coming to town, take a guess at what my school e-address is and you'll probably be right. It's as generically Covie as they come.
Your name is as Covey as they come. :) Any relation to Aaron?
I do crack myself up . . . .
No relation to Aaron. At least not that I'm aware of. One never can be too sure in these circles. :)
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