September 11, from a continent away and ten years later...
Yes, we observed Sept 11 out here on the "left side" of the country too.
But just as the original event had a far-away, "this isn't for real, is it?" feeling to it then, the memorials and the "this happened HERE" broadcast everywhere we looked felt far removed today.
We here (on the CA coast, at least) are a full 3000 miles away from where it happened. Few of us had family or close friends in New York State, much less in New York City or DC, and even fewer than that had family, friends or even acquaintances in the WTC or Pentagon. We watched the events from the remove of the TV, horrified and unable to look away in the same way lookie-loos can't look away from a massive pile-up on the freeway.
It was happening to us, but in a very strange way, it wasn't. It was "over there."
As a result, West Coasters don't have the PTSD that folks on the other side of the nation understandably have. We don't flinch when a plane flies over at low altitude. The sense of violation at being attacked on "American Soil" is a distant, more intellectual one. I'm not saying this to sound superior or anything, I'm just describing what it's like to be over HERE and look at events.
The one thing we share with the entire nation, however, is the way in which our politics took the attacks and turned toxic. Turned poisonous. Turned into something that no American would ever have imagined. We now, as a nation, have a "victim" complex - especially those who either make money or gain some semblence of authority and power by keeping us "at war" as often and in as many places as possible.
Americans tend to look at 9/11 as if we were the only country in the world to be attacked in such an inhumane and aggregious manner, where the attack was aimed at civilians. We have no concept of how lucky we have been as a nation NOT to have been attacked before now. Only in a modern-day era where the technology exists to put us within reach of our enemies across vast oceans do we now understand that we, too, are no longer invulnerable. The sad part, however, is what we've done because of this sense of moral outrage.
When I think of what happened as a direct consequence of September 11, I get more angry than sad. Little did Osama bin Laden know exactly how he was going to "defeat" America and Western Civilization when he planned and executed those attacks. But he won, folks, decisively won. And he did it by having US - both as a plural first-person noun and as a nationalistic label - do the REAL dirty work of dismantling a system of governmental checks and balances that made us a model of how things could and should be.
Suddenly, security became more important than principles. We have set aside our Constitutional rights in order to be "safe" - and managed not to make ourselves any safer. The Patriot Act, warrantless arrests, obscene "safety" procedures all must undergo at airports - all of these are post-9/11 kneejerk responses to the idea that someone "out there" doesn't like us enough that they'll attack us in our hometown. We have committed, as a nation (because in a nation that is supposedly "of, by and for the People", what is done by our government and/or military IS done by each of us by extension) things that we hung folks from Nazi Germany for after the Nuremberg Trials less than 70 years ago. How soon we forget the lessons of history.
Since when is America the land where people can be "disappeared", where their rights as American citizens are nullified BY AMERICAN OFFICIALS for no apparent reason, where they can be and often are tortured - up to and including being shipped off to other countries for the process, where the right of ALL to a transparent trial with a jury of citizens is abrogated to military tribunals, where a man can be held incommunicado and without access to council for as long as the government feels is necessary - up to and including for decades, where free speech often is curtailed because our politicians don't necessarily want to have to face those who disagree with them. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
America the Free has become America the Unsafe, America the Home of the Instinctively Frightened.
Bin Laden won.
We did it to ourselves by not standing by our Constitution and saying, "We don't care what you do to us. You will NOT make us like YOU." We allowed him to win by valuing security above liberty. Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither", and THAT'S the world we live in now: no liberty, and no security.
I look back at the victims of 9/11, both in the planes and on the ground, and grieve because of what has happened to our nation, and our national psyche, in their names. I seriously doubt that any of them would have wanted it, or approved of the intense change in direction our country took that morning. And I am ashamed of the blatant hypocrisy when I hear our leaders spout about the "human rights violations" elsewhere in the world; because those same violations, nine chances out of ten, are taking place right now right HERE in the US.
How dare we judge others, we who say one thing and do the opposite now? How dare we?
And that, my friends, is why I grieve on 9/11: I grieve the loss of life in passenger airplanes used as weapons by men with no morals, in the WTC and Pentagon which were used as targets; and I grieve the loss of the American military and the American spirit in general as a result in the decade that has followed.
But just as the original event had a far-away, "this isn't for real, is it?" feeling to it then, the memorials and the "this happened HERE" broadcast everywhere we looked felt far removed today.
We here (on the CA coast, at least) are a full 3000 miles away from where it happened. Few of us had family or close friends in New York State, much less in New York City or DC, and even fewer than that had family, friends or even acquaintances in the WTC or Pentagon. We watched the events from the remove of the TV, horrified and unable to look away in the same way lookie-loos can't look away from a massive pile-up on the freeway.
It was happening to us, but in a very strange way, it wasn't. It was "over there."
As a result, West Coasters don't have the PTSD that folks on the other side of the nation understandably have. We don't flinch when a plane flies over at low altitude. The sense of violation at being attacked on "American Soil" is a distant, more intellectual one. I'm not saying this to sound superior or anything, I'm just describing what it's like to be over HERE and look at events.
The one thing we share with the entire nation, however, is the way in which our politics took the attacks and turned toxic. Turned poisonous. Turned into something that no American would ever have imagined. We now, as a nation, have a "victim" complex - especially those who either make money or gain some semblence of authority and power by keeping us "at war" as often and in as many places as possible.
Americans tend to look at 9/11 as if we were the only country in the world to be attacked in such an inhumane and aggregious manner, where the attack was aimed at civilians. We have no concept of how lucky we have been as a nation NOT to have been attacked before now. Only in a modern-day era where the technology exists to put us within reach of our enemies across vast oceans do we now understand that we, too, are no longer invulnerable. The sad part, however, is what we've done because of this sense of moral outrage.
When I think of what happened as a direct consequence of September 11, I get more angry than sad. Little did Osama bin Laden know exactly how he was going to "defeat" America and Western Civilization when he planned and executed those attacks. But he won, folks, decisively won. And he did it by having US - both as a plural first-person noun and as a nationalistic label - do the REAL dirty work of dismantling a system of governmental checks and balances that made us a model of how things could and should be.
Suddenly, security became more important than principles. We have set aside our Constitutional rights in order to be "safe" - and managed not to make ourselves any safer. The Patriot Act, warrantless arrests, obscene "safety" procedures all must undergo at airports - all of these are post-9/11 kneejerk responses to the idea that someone "out there" doesn't like us enough that they'll attack us in our hometown. We have committed, as a nation (because in a nation that is supposedly "of, by and for the People", what is done by our government and/or military IS done by each of us by extension) things that we hung folks from Nazi Germany for after the Nuremberg Trials less than 70 years ago. How soon we forget the lessons of history.
Since when is America the land where people can be "disappeared", where their rights as American citizens are nullified BY AMERICAN OFFICIALS for no apparent reason, where they can be and often are tortured - up to and including being shipped off to other countries for the process, where the right of ALL to a transparent trial with a jury of citizens is abrogated to military tribunals, where a man can be held incommunicado and without access to council for as long as the government feels is necessary - up to and including for decades, where free speech often is curtailed because our politicians don't necessarily want to have to face those who disagree with them. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
America the Free has become America the Unsafe, America the Home of the Instinctively Frightened.
Bin Laden won.
We did it to ourselves by not standing by our Constitution and saying, "We don't care what you do to us. You will NOT make us like YOU." We allowed him to win by valuing security above liberty. Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither", and THAT'S the world we live in now: no liberty, and no security.
I look back at the victims of 9/11, both in the planes and on the ground, and grieve because of what has happened to our nation, and our national psyche, in their names. I seriously doubt that any of them would have wanted it, or approved of the intense change in direction our country took that morning. And I am ashamed of the blatant hypocrisy when I hear our leaders spout about the "human rights violations" elsewhere in the world; because those same violations, nine chances out of ten, are taking place right now right HERE in the US.
How dare we judge others, we who say one thing and do the opposite now? How dare we?
And that, my friends, is why I grieve on 9/11: I grieve the loss of life in passenger airplanes used as weapons by men with no morals, in the WTC and Pentagon which were used as targets; and I grieve the loss of the American military and the American spirit in general as a result in the decade that has followed.