cross posted
Let’s talk for a bit…
Considering the date today, the clear blue sky outside, and the fact that I’m writing this at my desk in a building in downtown Chicago that’s considered a terrorist target, it’s hard not to wax a bit historical, even on a psychedelic-music-specific blog. I mean… I need a security card to do anything within this building, which is hilarious to me when noting that if, ya know, someone wanted to 86 this building, they could probably accomplish this goal without ever showing up on the premises. This is not a threat or anything, witch hunters, I’m simply speaking academically.
I very lucidly remember when it happened. I was a senior in high school and watching the morning unfurl in my AP Government class. My well-meaning but somewhat kooky teacher took a sort of anthropologically-removed delight in what was going on with respect to the subject she taught. “I can’t wait to talk about the political and social implications of today,” she smirked. I also remember when the North Tower collapsed - among the confusion and gasps, the dude who sat behind me mused “oh shit… this means war.” In my wisdom, I turned around and retorted “no it doesn’t… no sovereign nation did this. This was a group of bummed-out cohorts, probably of multiple nationalities, who planned and executed this. You can’t wage a, what, a ‘war on terror.’ That’s like waging a war on ghosts, or bad vibes, or, like, an ideal. You can’t just march into Terroriststan and seek your retribution.” So, I ate some twice-baked crow about a month afterwards.
Something that’s always bothered me, though, is how this, a tragic event, became a political issue this decade, and became the springboard for a dire national paradigm, ultimately brought upon by all of us. This is a moral and humanist issue, not political. And thanks to the politicization, and ultimately trivialization, of 9/11 - spewing forth constant rhetoric, punditspeak, and instruction on what to do/not to do “or else the terrorists win” - we have essentially done what we said we were never going to do: we “forgot” it. We let this become political - by the way we responded to it, how we’ve voted, by the way we spoke and continue to speak about it, etc. It’s deplorable.
The first time I noticed this phenomenon was when our principal, every day for weeks on end after the attacks, would pontificate how important safety is to the school and what we would do in the event of an Anthrax attack. I found this strange. Was anyone, really, going to put forth the effort to fuck with a public high school in central Kentucky just for the lulz? It was a waste of five minutes, every day, that I could not get back, not to mention a waste of school resources. Throughout high school, I was on our newspaper staff, The Masthead. When a new issue was coming out, we would promote it by placing handmade banners in the hallways throughout the school. In response to our principal’s unfounded (and ultimately irresponsible and panic-inciting) fears, I made a banner that read something to the effect of “New Masthead on Thursday - 99.9% Anthrax Free.” Kenny Bloggins got to go see the newspaper teacher shortly afterward. This was the first instance that our response to 9/11 semmed rather asinine. It wouldn’t be the last.
On our senior trip to New York, while there was still rubble on Vesey Street, souvenir shops were selling fuckin’ World Trade Center snowglobes. It was vile. Over the next couple of years, the event evolved into a neologistic issue in elections, and the panic it produced became the final arbiter in the 2004 election - a watershed in national stupidity. Shit, this event was the pillar on which a certain mayor’s presidential bid stood on. The attack became the origin point for a flubbed war, massive administrative corruption, xenophobia, really bad Photoshops of crying eagles, and, eventually, a joke. Instead of respecting 9/11 for what it was, a national tragedy and a opportunity to praise those who exemplified good in the face of and in direct contrast to evil (both first respondents and citizens), it has since become a sound bite, a visceral talking point, a justification for prejudice, and a political move to initiative massive, gnarly reforms. So ironically, the constant repetition of “never forget” played a part in the public psyche forgetting what we were supposed to take away from 9/11. Coining catchphrases and optioning several major motion pictures ain’t it. Something like this is a prime example of what we could’ve done, taking an opportunity to extract a lesson from what happened and better our great country, instead of letting our leaders spy on us, reelect them thereafter, and allow them and the media to re-trivialize the lives of 3,000 people. How did we let this happen? Why are we Fed-Exing our selves to hell with cute stamps?
Somewhere along the line, admist the panic, Kuber-Ross stages of grief, and the media’s (and, well, our) cheapening of this pivotal day in American history, we got confused, and never really learned a thing. The confusion is, now, more deafening than it was then. And that is odious.