9/11

While I don't typically like hopping on sentimental bandwagons like this and I've already taken time out of the past seven years to grieve all I need to grieve, it is kind of interesting to reflect on the day itself. It's a fascinating study in fear, insecurity, paranoia, and a coming of age of sorts. That day we were having our senior pictures taken for the yearbook during my English class. Before that, though, I had my painting class and in the last 10 minutes of that, we started hearing about something that had happened in New York...like an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center.

Your gut reaction was to think it was just an accident. Nothing too scary about that. Sad, yeah, but it's just an isolated, rare incident that just randomly happened and it won't happen again for a while...if ever. Then right when you settle back into your skin and rationalize everything, the other plane hits. These were no accidents. The second plane hit well into the next class (English), and for the whole hour, we were glued to the screen. Eventually, we went to the auditorium for pictures, came back to the classroom, but only stayed for about 10 minutes before the school was evacuated due to a bomb threat (our school was notorious for those).

The whole time, more information's coming out about planes crashing into the Pentagon and one that crashed in Pennsylvania and one that was supposedly going to the White House (which turned out to be the one in PA). In any case, nobody was really worried about the bomb threat...we knew it was fake just like the other twenty we'd have in a given year. But it yanked us out of the routine of classes and gave us time to stew over the plane crashes and the World Trade Center coming down, which fed our fear and paranoia. The ground had fallen out from underneath us and we didn't know if this was the end of the world, just a similar event to Pearl Harbor, or if they were just freak accidents. It was scary. I kept thinking it might be the end of the world and the attacks would just keep on coming and coming and not just stop at four. Sure, we were pretty safe in Lexington, but who knew what these people were going to do next?

Our emotions and our hearts were raw. Thousands of people just like us--Americans going about their daily duty--had died. Security was out the window. Life as we knew it was over. Looking back on it, the whole experience was frightening, but it was more interesting just to see the human reaction to a tragedy like that...not only in myself, but in the people around me and in the country. Everybody was scared shitless and we did courageous things for each other...but once we realized we had our security back again (whether the government said so or not), we went back to being our regular selfish selves. We were back in the saddle again after being knocked off our high horse in the world.

That's what I believe led to us being attacked in the first place. Ron Paul believes it's because we kept bombing Iraq for ten years, starting with Operation Desert Storm. While that might be part of it, I don't think that's all or even most. What I think is the cause of their disgust with us is our pursuit of the almighty dollar. We've unknowingly been engaged in a cultural/commercial imperialism in the last few decades, allowing our culture to pervade places with longstanding traditions and cultures of their own. Our culture is seen as strange, new, and attractive and it's adopted by the youth who have no appreciation of their own native heritage. So then they start acting in ways that go against the ways of their ancestors, the old traditionalists get pissed after a while, and they want to make it go away. There's a great quote in a film starring Sean Connery called [i]The Wind and the Lion[/i], where he plays an Arab chieftain in Morocco at the turn of the 19th Century. In a letter to Teddy Roosevelt, who's just invaded Morocco to rescue an American woman and her children that were abducted by Connery's character, he says, "I, like the lion, must remain in my place. While you, like the wind, will never know yours." While the movie was written and directed by an American, John Milius, I do think he articulated the mindset found in the Arab world. They want to keep their traditions and their culture and not have it robbed from them by us, just so we can become richer. We won't listen to reasoning, so drastic measures must be taken. Hence, 9/11.

We think our culture war between the liberals and the conservatives is rough. This ain't rough. What's going on in the Middle East, between the youth and the elders...change vs. tradition...is [i]rough[/i]. We indirectly instigated it by influencing sectors of their society, but now we're pulled into it, both by our own means and by theirs. It sucks, I want it to be over so there's no more killing, but in the end, I think we'll have a rather pleasant end result.