9/11 and all that it means to the West
No fancy graphics or amusing pictures for this one. Each year as we arrive at September 11th, those of us in the Western world look back at the terrorist acts on that day in 2001 that have forever changed the way we look at our lives. Just like the old “where were you when JFK died?”, pretty much every adult in can remember where they were when they found out what was happening in New York.
Myself, I had just arrived in Las Vegas, getting off a plane about 5 hours before the first hit in New York. I was staying with my then business partner, and he came to wake me up with a “you are probably going to want to see this” sort of deal. It took a while for the concept to register. That was truly one weird day. The days the followed in Vegas were even weirder, with absolutely no planes in the air, no nothing, it was like the city went to sleep. Most of the tourists in the city didn’t want to be there, didn’t have any way to leave, and many of them didn’t have any money to do anything but sit around and watch CNN and see the video of that horrible morning over and over again. It was a truly bizarre time.
The US in particularly has been through many of the stages of grieving. Denial was tried and failed, although there are some who still claim missiles hit the Pentagon, not a plane. Anger has been tried on as well, which lead to George W Bush’s war on terrorism, leading to the current messes that are Iraq and Afghanistan. It has spiraled through depression and frustration, and ended up with a bizarre sort of acceptance that few find truly acceptable.
That acceptance has changed the way that the Western world looks at war, at terrorism, at personal security. American military action has always been against another army, against countries, against, dictators. Iraq in the end may be the last of those wars, and even it has mutated into a battle against terrorist actions. That is a battle that the US is really ill equipped to fight, and many brave men and women, sons and daughters have lost their lives trying to fight the shadows that are the terrorists.
As a whole, the Western world is also less tolerate of people who are “not like them”. There has been plenty of misdirected anger against Muslims, a sort of a nasty undercurrent of hatred. Sometimes it feels like many in the US are sitting at home, sharpening their pitch forks and preparing the fire carrying poles, ready to do a good old fashioned lynching, not against the black man, but against the brown man. Many mosques have been damaged, vandalized. The very beliefs of the Muslim people have come into question, and anger often surfaces when people see that women appear to have fewer rights and are treated poorly, forced to cover up and hide from society.
The current “burn a Koran day” sentiment being fanned by certain groups is just another outcrop of this anger. It’s a stupid act, a needless taunting of a people who already are angry back at the US for years of failed policies and angry military actions in the Middle East. It is the sort of action that drives more sane Muslims to become more militant, more willing to fight against the US.
We spin closer and closer to the abyss, a sort of personal one on one war that is just not going to turn out well. Here is to hoping that on 9/11, saner and more stable minds will win out the day, remember that like nuclear attacks on Japan, we just do not want to ever go down this road again.
