Remembering Reality

9/11

Never in the history of America has a date contained so much emotional and political baggage. On the infamous autumn day eight years ago, thousands of United States citizens were killed in the hijackings and subsequent crashes of four commercial airline jets at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, respectively. 

Unsurprisingly, a majority of Americans have spent the day remembering those who lost their lives on that fatal morning. Facebook updates, Tweets from Twitter, and other variations of modern, online social networking sites have served as the most popular mediums through which the American public has communicated its acknowledgment of 9/11 victims.

Despite my unquestionable respect for those who lost loved ones on September 11th, I have to ask quite frankly: is this the best way to remember?

Yes, we must sympathize and support our fellow citizens who mark this day as a friend or family member's final moment on earth, but shouldn't we equally devote as much time to remember why our government - through ineffective policies and a failure to cross-culturally communicate - allowed this to happen and why we, as inhabitants of our nation, decided it wasn't worth our time to pay attention to what was going on in the first place?

After all, "shocking" is not necessarily the most fitting word to describe the 9/11 attacks - not if you've done the research.

CIA officials, members of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, and other significant figures in foreign policy and American politics were all more than aware that al-Qaeda, fed up with Western intervention  since the U.S. funded the 1979 war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, dividing and tearing the nation to shreds, culturally, politically, and economically, had been planning and executing attacks on the United States since the '90s. Al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998; they bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000; Osama bin Laden threatened us continuously for years. 

So, why were the 9/11 attacks not foreseen in our future?

And perhaps more importantly, why did our government fail to prevent them from happening?


And even MORE importantly, why did we as a country remain inattentive to our leaders' actions and fail to hold them accountable for questionable interactions overseas? 

The answer lies in the deeply flawed "logic" of America's political ideology, which includes traversing the world unsparingly with an unequivocal promotion of invulnerability and superiority. Sitting on the highest of political and economic horses, the United States seems to think such attacks could never and would never happen to the “richest” “most liberated” and “most developed” land on earth. 


Our country has collectively thought - and seems to still think today - that its corporate-based, ethnocentric interventions and reconstructions of other cultures and nations do not do any harm, but rather solely benefit both the world and Capitalist systems driving our now regrettably globalized and Westernized economies.

This pretense is completely misinformed and misguided on every level of ethically sound diplomatic relations one could imagine.   

In reality, 9/11 reminds us that the United States is fragile and cannot continue to lead the world as an international bully; we must dramatically alter our approach to foreign policy or will continue to see more widespread attacks in our future.

But let's not get too wrapped up in this convoluted thought: Please, do remember those who we lost on Sept. 11th. I cannot fathom the painful difficulties some Americans must be going through at this very moment, attempting to come to terms with the devastating departure of a close one. 

However, I can fathom why such tragedies would occur in the first place. We (meaning both our government AND the citizens who proceeded to look the other way, or not look at all) exacerbated problems in Afghanistan in an effort to eradicate its "Communist regime." We left the place a mess after we funded and trained the Mujahedeen. We let Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda threaten us and ignored it while our economic and cultural hubris expanded exponentially and without caution. And then, we witnessed one of the most horrific attacks on American soil in the history of our relatively young nation. 

Friends and fellow citizens, let's be respectful. But let's be angry, too. And inquisitive. And uncertain. And demanding.

Don't remember only what happened on 9/11, but also why it happened.


Let's change how our country exerts itself in the global community, before we are eventually taught again how dramatically inappropriate our impact on other cultures abroad really is.


Peace,


Chris.