It is nice for you to help people...9/11 five years later...
Five years later. It's a good day to be a reactionary, zealot, or true believer. Today is a great day for Those Who Know for Certain, regardless of what they "know."
You can join those who will use today to rally around the flag and the rubble, conjuring up ghosts to sell a future of constant warfare and the involuntary exportation of democracy.
You can flip that same flag upside down and use today to find company among those who won't believe it's dark outside if GW tells them so--even when it's midnight.
You can wrap your head in foil and look for mystery flashes and evil smoke faces in the slow motion video from five years ago. Join those claiming a setup or attributing those events to Illuminati, Masons, CFR, CIA, Bush himself, or the ZOG.
You can use today to decry the loss of civil rights subsequent to the attacks. Or, you can join those who would further restrict liberties in the name of security.
Today can be an exciting day for anyone who knows the answers, even if their "knowledge" is based on partial understandings, half-truths, oversimplified perspectives of the world and is twisted by our visceral instinct toward threats.
You don't have to be right to argue your position today and to find many others who are on your side.
You don't even actually have to say a word, if you are feeling shy or reserved. You can just watch or listen to hour after hour of 9/11 memorial media coverage and filter it through your own perspective of the events--or curse out its conservative/liberal/conspiratorial bias.
Me? I'm not in the middle (that is usually where ignorance runs to hide). I have my opinions on our post-9/11 policy and on why the attacks happened in the first place.
I'm not going to get into that today, though. Today, I am going to keep it simple.
After 9/11, some fourth graders in Indiana wrote letters of support and drew pictures for rescue workers who were scouring the rubble of the World Trade Center. The graphic for this post comes from that excercise. There's a flag. There's a representation of the WTC. There's a one sentence message.
That's my message for today.
"It is nice for you to help people."
True for the first responders. True for the rest of us, too.
I believe that the U.S. will long be judged, in large part, by our reaction to the events of five years ago. It's serious stuff, to say the least. Millions of lives in the U.S. and abroad are at stake. The future's landscape is in play here. It's too important to be blindly partisan and it's too important to lose track of some fundamental truths while we continue to develop our outlooks and direct the future.
"It is nice for you to help people" is one of those fundamental truths. It applies in policy construction. It applies to our discourse over the issues involved. It's worth remembering today.
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