adventures in disaster

9/11

I hate that short form thing. It should really be something more profound, more terrifying.
I get the short hand way of communicating but for the destruction of the towers short form seems trite and lazy as hell.
The world hasn't really changed any since then other than weird new rules for flying unless ofcourse you are brown skinned.
I can only guess at what it is like to get through the day being obviously Arab.
I have Arab friends but I am too ashamed to ask them how bad it is.
I have struggled mightily with my own outrage. After hearing about the group in Toronto I was left shocked and furious.
But I didn't blame my Arab friends. I knew them. They were people to me and I knew how much they valued their new life and how angry they were that anyone would cause such outrage.
I knew they valued their life and their children's lives. They would never train their babies to murder the rest of us.

I have no answers on why some people love their lives and never lose hope that their children will have wonderful, purposeful lives and others put no value on anyone's life.
I have moved past the excuse stage..The bad childhoods, the poverty, lack of education, unemployment whatever.
African Americans have been the most abused people in the world. They have known such suffering no one could ever compare but they stayed strong. They never lost hope, they believed in their right to life, happiness, a future for their children.
They have been fought at every turn, they have fought themselves but still they survive, they prosper and dammit they do not murder innocent people in the name of religion or a history of abuse.
They chose the route that their religion taught them.
The Muslims swear the Koran is all about love thy neighbour and respect but it seems African Americans actually read their bible and radical, violent Muslims use theirs as a doorstop.
Every great leader in the Black movement used the Christian bible as the bedrock of their struggle. The lessons they learned in church were the lessons they taught the white world over and over again.

Radical Muslims made no effort to try to educate the western world. They didn't understand that we in the West are lazy. We need to hear what the issue is and we need to see real people and stuff happening on the news. We need a compelling movie version of the problem. Then and only then will we wake up and go "oh, damn I see your point..We really shouldn't have done that, sorry". Then we could honestly try to be better and more sensitive.

I barely knew anything about Palestine before September 11. I knew nothing about AlQueda or Afghanistan. Hell, I thought everything was fine in Afghanistan because the Russians had left.
I also considered myself pretty well read and well informed.

I knew nothing about how outraged some people were about the US being in Saudi. The Saudis never said anything and the news never mentioned that some Muslims felt that Mecca was being literally soiled by the presence of infidels. I was bizarrely surprised because as a Westerner I didn't get that for some people a place can be completely sacred. I had a tourists brain. Let's go into this cool church and walk around!! . Let's take culturally insensitive pictures of people!! Let's get all angry and defensive when they freak out and tell us to get out.

Isn't it awful to know that September 11th and this Iraq war could have been avoided if the US had never landed their military in Saudi?
If there had been some cultural sensitivity and that includes the Saudi royal family we could have avoided this mess we are stuck in.

I do wonder if Osama would have found another excuse but honestly I don't think so. Osama let the leaders of Saudi know his outrage and they ignored him. He then voiced his outrage to the US and was once again ignored. No one took him seriously and like all sociopaths that pissed him off. He wanted some attention and when he was ignored he decided on a course of action that got him the attention he craved.
Osama could have been stopped by the Saudis, hell his own family could have stopped him but no one took him seriously.
Osama was considered a coward and a failure during the Afghan war. He ran during bombings and he led his fighters into death way too many times. He slunk out of Afghanistan his reputation in tatters and he returned to Saudi looking for something, anything that would restore his own sense of his own wonderfulness. He found it in a radical, violent bastardization of his Muslim faith.
He then used his cash to buy himself some flunkies and ran a PR campaign of death to the West.
And no other Muslim group challenged this campaign.
Where is the moderate Muslim movement?
Is it because they can't find their voice or is that voice being suppressed?
I look at Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Saudi and all I hear is the radicals screaming for murder. I can't hear a moderate voice of a strong leader that says "that is enough".
Where are the true leaders?
Where is the Martin Luther King, the JFK of our time?
Is stuttering George really the man that will lead us all to peace?
I think not. He may be the man that leads us all into WWIII though.

It's September 11 2006, five years later and the world is unchanged. Palestinians still fight for a home land. Israel still fights for it's right to exist. Iraq is still unstable and Iran is still run by the mullahs, Afghanistan stills searches for a path into the future. All these wars, all this horrific loss of life and nothing has changed...We aren't any safer, our world isn't any cleaner and we still can't live with each other.

posted by adventures in disaster @ 10:09 PM