Musings —09.11.2013 06:24 AM
—Today
None of us will ever forget today, not in our lifetimes. But I am struck, today, by how it is increasingly discussed less in the media – and perhaps by all of us, too.
Is that good? Is that normal? Is it a mistake? I don’t know the answer. But I am thinking about it – and the victims and the consequences – today.
Warren,
When I saw Wednesday September 11 on my phone, I thought about 9-11-01 and then came what comes on every anniversary — will they hit the U.S. again today?
Like the Kennedy assassination those who lived through it will always wonder, what the heck just happened?
I think we ended up with all those misguided measures because a) people who cared and wanted to prevent this from happening again didn’t really know what to do; b) others who don’t really care but had their own agendas live by the principle “never let a good crisis go to waste” and they took advantage of the situation.
The people who died can never come back, it makes me sad.
Reminds me of too my things that would have people label me a conspiracy theorist…that would be oblivion. Does make me wonder at people who get sad about his one, but regard all the other ones (Panama City, December 1989, for example) as not worth a second of thought.
Reminds me that the way to control people is to rip off their history from them, as in Geo Orwell saying something like: He who controls the past, controls the present; he who controls the present, controls the future.
We are as far away from 9/11 as 9/11 was from the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s natural that we should talk about it less.
It spent forty minutes this morning with my intermediate students discussing 9/11 in class after a short film on the subject. Remember, these kids were being born in 2001! They had heard of it, of course, but had zero frame of reference. It proved a really fruitful time today … discussions on being aware of the world at large, paying attention to history, and on human nature (constrasting the brutality of the attacks with the heroism of first responders and everyday people on the ground.)
Talk to your kids, folks. Talk all of the time, and about everything.
There’s irony in this date, as Chileans and Americans, well know. It’s when they both lost their democracies.
It’s not going to be forgotten but many are tired to being manipulated or cowered into accepting everything the American surveillance empire demands. America panicked, overreacted and blamed someone else on that day. We all have paid an obscene price for this lack of judgement. Instead we were served a blood vengeance which continues unabated with howls from the same people for more in Syria. Political problems aren’t solved with military force but they are exacerbated. Human sacrifice never appeases the Gods. When do our leaders learn this lesson or will they ever?
Finally, George W. Bush gave a rehabilitation interview with the National Geographic Channel a few days ago. He says he never had a plan. Well, it sure shows what comes from that. What America needs is diplomatic imagination instead of the ultra-violence which makes A Clockwork Orange a suitable comparison to their current actions and attitudes. The American public has come to this realization. Whether this cloud burst of clarity persists remains to be seen.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_on_9_11_syrias_bloody
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_instead_of_illegal_threat_to
http://www.democracynow.org/special/1973_chilean_coup
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/9/11/the_9_11_decade_timeline_of_voices_of_dissent_on_democracy_now
http://billmoyers.com/episode/what-are-we-doing-in-syria/
It bothers me a lot when I hear people banter around that “never forget” rhetoric.” How the hell can we *ever* forget? Anyone with access to tv, radio or the web on that day and who was old enough to process that they were witnessing mass murder…you don’t ever forget a thing like that…no matter how much we even might wish we could. In the intervening years, plenty has happened. Some of it was understandable, but frankly a lot of it wasn’t, and it seems to be getting worse over time rather than better. And yet every time someone questions why it’s become okay for governments to spy on their citizens–including cases without warrants–or why it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between police and military on the street when something like the Boston incident happens…these very reasonable people get shut down with “oh, well this is what we have to do to prevent another 9/11.” No one has the guts to say that it’s time to move on and to start giving serious thought to what we’ve given up, and what the civic dividend has been for all of us.
Bruce A. hints at it, but there really ought to be more said about the other September 11th, the one from 40 years ago when the US government overthrew the democratically elected president and government of Chile. OK technically it was the Chilean armed forces under Augusto Pinochet who did it, but they were backed to the hilt by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA, oh, and Margaret Thatcher and conservatives everywhere too. In the aftermath more than 3,000 people were murdered, more than 30,000 tortured and 80,000 arrested. All because they supported the democratically elected government.
Following 9/11 the US government got ripped to shreds for having failed to perceive the very real threat.
So they cranked it up a whole lot of notches. Nobody wants to see anything like that again in this lifetime.
Not unlike the Pearl Harbor experience; almost a comedy of errors, oversights, and people just not taking stuff seriously.
It’s a no win thing. Too much security, everybody bitches. Then the s*** hits the fan, a lot of people get killed, and everyone bitches a great deal more.
Who would want to be President (…or Prime Minister) and have something like that happen on their watch??? And know they’re going to wear it, no matter what they do, or ever tried to do, in order to prevent it?
Rational people, given the choice, will error on the side of caution, and isn’t that, at the end of the day, still the best strategy?
All that said…
Always amazes me how soon we forget.
Someone said it was primarily a failure of imagination on the part of the US government, even under Obama’s watch I still don’t think they have learned. The security apparatus put in place since and as a consequence of 9/11 is the biggest make work project in history, is almost totally useless and the reason for the funding shortfall of so many other more life affirming programs that have had to be cut all over the US, state and federal. Basically, it’s bullshit.
Black helicopters hovering stationary in the air over Pearson. News websites slammed, reduced to 1980’s era text display. CNN dropping all commercials. “Imagine” on the radio.
I fly through Boston occasionally. Taxiing pastthis continues to serve as a poignant reminder.
How else can one cope.
“So it goes.”
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There’s a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: “Shit happens, and it’s awful, but it’s also okay. We deal with it because we have to.”
http://www.avclub.com/articles/15-things-kurt-vonnegut-said-better-than-anyone-el,1858/
Actually, we do. You may choose not to believe it, or choose not to educate yourself, but there’s lot of data explaining what happened. No offense, but feel free to piss off with your conspiracy theories.
By the way, my earlier comment was directed to Iris Mclean’s drivel of a response but for some reason didn’t post as a reply.
Hemingway famously wrote one the greatest and shortest sentences of all time.
For sale. Baby shoes. Never used.
to paraphrase
Building seven. Not hit. Fell down.
Interesting that a simple observation would be met with such hostility.
I meant no disrespect.