A moment of silence
Sep. 11th, 2006 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbThe world changes. The world stays the same.
The events of this day five years ago barely touched my life. I came home from school - early: the inaugural Mass of the school year had just ended, and as compensation for a boring hour or two of prayers, we were freed of the last hour or two of classes - to my mother phoning me from work. "Turn on the television, quick! Just turn it on!"
I turned it on in time to see replay footage of the first tower falling, before the second tower fell. The BBC reporters - usually calm, collected newscasters - were babbling disbelief. I remember seeing them run the footage again, and thinking That looks like a special effect. Like a film. It can't be real.
And then, People are dying there.
It seemed important to watch, somehow. To bear witness, if that was the only thing you could do. To watch, and not to turn away.
It didn't touch me. It wasn't my city, nor my country, nor even my continent. No one died, whom I knew.
But in a sense, it did touch me. And remembering, I have the urge to say, I remember. I won't forget.
I watched. I can't forget. The towers fell, and thousands of people died in the space of an hour, and I watched, because that was all I could do from the safety of half a world's distance. I can't forget.
September 11th, 2001, has been used as the excuse for two foreign adventures on the part of the United States' government. The war in Afghanistan might have been justified, perhaps. The subsequent so-called 'peace' there, however, is not. One thing to tear a country down. Another to fail at rebuilding it afterwards, for lack of effort and will.
The effort and will that could have been spent to procure a lasting, meaningful peace in Afghanistan were turned, instead, towards the lies and propaganda that would excuse an invasion of Iraq. Thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians have died in that country, for a war that was begun under false pretences. The sum of the WTC's deaths has been equalled ten times over. Not all at once, in an hour or a morning, but in the slow attrition of airstrikes and 'collateral damage', bombings and firefights, in a crossfire that has destroyed their lives immediately and by inches.
I haven't watched that. It isn't shown on all our screens. It doesn't interrupt regular programming, or shock us all down to our marrow. These acts of violence don't shake the foundations of our world.
People are dying there.
When I remember September 11th, I remember that, too.
As then, so now. It seems important not to turn away.
The events of this day five years ago barely touched my life. I came home from school - early: the inaugural Mass of the school year had just ended, and as compensation for a boring hour or two of prayers, we were freed of the last hour or two of classes - to my mother phoning me from work. "Turn on the television, quick! Just turn it on!"
I turned it on in time to see replay footage of the first tower falling, before the second tower fell. The BBC reporters - usually calm, collected newscasters - were babbling disbelief. I remember seeing them run the footage again, and thinking That looks like a special effect. Like a film. It can't be real.
And then, People are dying there.
It seemed important to watch, somehow. To bear witness, if that was the only thing you could do. To watch, and not to turn away.
It didn't touch me. It wasn't my city, nor my country, nor even my continent. No one died, whom I knew.
But in a sense, it did touch me. And remembering, I have the urge to say, I remember. I won't forget.
I watched. I can't forget. The towers fell, and thousands of people died in the space of an hour, and I watched, because that was all I could do from the safety of half a world's distance. I can't forget.
September 11th, 2001, has been used as the excuse for two foreign adventures on the part of the United States' government. The war in Afghanistan might have been justified, perhaps. The subsequent so-called 'peace' there, however, is not. One thing to tear a country down. Another to fail at rebuilding it afterwards, for lack of effort and will.
The effort and will that could have been spent to procure a lasting, meaningful peace in Afghanistan were turned, instead, towards the lies and propaganda that would excuse an invasion of Iraq. Thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians have died in that country, for a war that was begun under false pretences. The sum of the WTC's deaths has been equalled ten times over. Not all at once, in an hour or a morning, but in the slow attrition of airstrikes and 'collateral damage', bombings and firefights, in a crossfire that has destroyed their lives immediately and by inches.
I haven't watched that. It isn't shown on all our screens. It doesn't interrupt regular programming, or shock us all down to our marrow. These acts of violence don't shake the foundations of our world.
People are dying there.
When I remember September 11th, I remember that, too.
As then, so now. It seems important not to turn away.
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From the U.S.
Date: 2006-09-12 08:44 pm (UTC)An ancient history professor I'd taken some classes from said at this point, "Well, if the next plane hits the Pentagon, they've got my support." He spent the next year fighting to keep his job.
In the US, by the time United 83 went down, it seemed that there could be any number of planes going any number of places.
At the time, I'd been a bit discouraged about the country, not like I am now, but more than I'd been. We were in the rule of an idiot who'd used dishonest means to sieze an election he'd lost. The attacks made me remember that the U.S. is a great and unique place, and it was worth defending.
The feeling was mostly lost from research into the situation. I'd heard that the attackers were motivated by a simple hatred of Western ideas, and it quickly became clear they were angry at U.S. foreign policy. They were sick people who did a terrible thing, but they were reacting to a very real and very terrible thing.
By now, I almost feel shame whenever I hear 9/11 mentioned. I have to remind myself that there's no real justice to it. I have a cousin who had an art studio in one of the towers. His mother was in town and insisted he have breakfast with her, and that's where he was when the planes hit (about half the Americans I've talked to have had a story like that about someone they know). If his mother hadn't been in town, he wouldn't have deserved to die. The people in that plane were just people in the plane. They didn't ask to be the bloody shirt the Bush administration waved whenever it wanted public support for their latest atrocity.
The Republicans act like 9/11 created their policies, when the truth is the other way around. I remember the day with sadness for both the horrors it held and the horrors committed in its name.
Re: From the U.S.
Date: 2006-09-12 09:04 pm (UTC)I have the impression that the roots of the... ideology, that made the WTC attack possible have been growing since the end of the second world war. The politics of the Middle East are tangled web, and any chance of unravelling even a part of it has since been squandered.
Not being USian, myself, I can't hazard a guess as to how much of the actions of the Bush administration have since been motivated by stupidity/ignorance/negligence/deliberate-plot-to-turn-America-into-an-apparently-fascist-state, but this /a> little list chilled my blood.
I don't know. When I see the US intelligence services imitating the Gestapo and the Gulag, what'm I supposed to think? (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007974.html#007974)