So, today is 9/11. I almost missed it. It’s not like it catches you by surprise, you’re not going to forget the date. But it’s just been slipping by for a few years now without much notice.
As an event it is still very important. History flowed from that day. But it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Remember how everyone was saying, on those days after 9/11/2001, that they thought about life differently, about the things that really mattered and the things that didn’t? A couple years ago I felt frustrated by how quickly that seemed to disappear, how quickly genuine sentiment turned into empty rhetoric. A few years ago that transition was frustrating, now the whole thing seems laughable. The death of irony? No… after 9/11 our modern cynicism was down but it wasn’t out. It came back fighting, and a National Sense Of Grief was no match.
Whatever. I’m tired of it anyway. You win Whatever, you’re the champ.
No related posts.
Wow, that’s depressing. Still, it’s reassuring that even hard core Python developers have these thoughts. I guess being a newb to socket programming isn’t so important after all . . .
What happened that date was terrible, we must never forget. But the time after 9/11 has been even more frightening… Why are media and the official people trying to divide the human kind? Afganistan people are terrorists, iraq people also, and iranian… and everybody that does not follow the spoken word of some country’s elected officials. As a matter of fact our society got major problems heading our way! It ain’t terrorism, it ain’t muslims, it ain’t christian people but it’s the lack of energy. Our stock of fossil fuels are drying out fast… really fast. In the 1970′s USA reached their peak in oil production, that year or the year after the global oil production dropped about 5%. Those 5% resulted in a massive price raise in the US, oil prices went up to 300-400% ! The oil has made our world a small our in terms of reachability the last century. The unlimited access to cheap energy made it possible to expand the markets to other parts of the world, and still remind competative. Today the oil production drop between 3-8% yearly, depending on which oilfield you investigate. The supply of cheap energy is running out, and the consequenses may be horrible if we don’t cooperate. About 80% of our food is made from oil, natural gas or derivates of those products. We harvest our food with machines built on factories that require oil. To operate those machines we need oil. The crops are supplied nutrients which contain materials… from fossil resources. The finished product is transportet on oil-required transportation networks etc. “Alternative” energy such as nuclear, coal etc… all require OIL. A microchip require aprox. 100 times it’s own weight in fossil material to get produced. A car require twice as much. We use oil to produce and operate the machines that create solar cell panels, the machines that fetch coal and even the machines that may extract thorium. We as a society need to focus on this major problem, we need to cooperate with each other to ensure the survival of more people! Doesn’t matter if you are muslim, christian, american, french or canadian. We need to make our local societies more self suffient, cause prices on transportation is about to sky rocket.
Many months ago the fatalities in Iraq were said to be 665,000 people. It was a doctors without borders report. The number now is sure to be much higher.
No, there hasn’t been a link proven between those people and the 9/11 attack. Also the claim of weapons of mass destruction has been found to be a lie.
There however was a link between the US giving money and weapons to the people behind the 9/11 attack in the past. As well as personal, and business ties with the bush family.
The US people have been seriously played. Shame on you for letting the government do such a thing. Shame too on all the other countries for going along with the US.
Even if there was a direct link between the leaders or people of iraq, the response has been barbaric in the extreme.
bla bla bla
Torkel gets it, but when presented with the hard facts about how we maintain living standards in the industrialised world, it’s easy for people to shut down and go into denial, looking for cheap “fixes” which are nothing more than good luck charms that allow everyone to keep on pretending that there’s no problem. There was a report a while back about sustainable resource consumption which mentioned “trucks passing in the night” or some such thing, where some of the figures about the amount of goods needlessly exchanged were astonishing – that Britain and Germany, I think it was, exchange almost exactly the same amount of frozen chicken in a year. “But chicken is cheaper in Germany!” says some “empowered” consumer in Britain, presumably echoing their counterpart in Germany talking about the prices in Britain. Somehow fuel oil is just a cheap lubricant to gratify the whims of the consumer masses and a bunch of idiot traders.
Perhaps I am reading your post incorrectly but it seems like you are mourning the lack of change that the events of 9/11/2001 seemed to herald. In the aftermath people appeared to step down a couple of rungs on [Maslows Heirarchy of Needs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow'shierarchyof_needs) , perhaps down to the level of “Safety”.
That’s a re-setting of priorities that might look like progress toward a more rational way of living but it’s just temporary. Maslow tells us that as soon as our need for safety is met we move back up the heirarchy to esteem and self-actualization – back to “normal life.”
I think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq moved the sense of danger to “elsewhere” despite an increase in fear at home.
And the “National Sense Of Grief” was always going to pass. Grief isn’t rational either, it’s an emotional response to loss. I think a nation motivated by grief would be truly monstrous.
So people go back to their old ways. It’s disappointing but I don’t think it’s cynicism, it’s human nature.
But people can change, so don’t give up.
The things that I thought really mattered, like coming together to help each other and making the most of the time we have, seemed to matter to us as a nation only for a few days. Then the real “genuine sentiment” took over: (a) we can’t get them but somebody’s gonna pay, who will we blow up, (b) we obviously need to give up some [essential liberty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationalSecurityLetter “National Security Letter”) for some [temporary safety](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin “Benjamin Franklin – Wikiquote”).
“But it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
Tell it to the dead people in Iraq. Tell it to the waterboarded political prisioners in Guantanamo.
Oh no, it still means a lot: the excuse USA use to slaughter thousands of innocents for profit in the name of “grief”.
Wow. there’s a lot of emotions about this. The U.S. isn’t in Iraq because Iraq attacked us. It’s in Iraq because it presented a credible threat of danger. Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people. According to the U.N. Darfur report, Saddam had frozen his illegal weapons programme due to the embargo but was planning on starting the weapons programme again as soon as the embargo was lifted.
But to make statements like the U.S. is barbaric seems to indicate that you may not understand what Iraq was like before the fall of Saddam.
Ian’s got it right. People heal. You can’t grieve forever. Having a long memory isn’t a bad thing.
Torkel is wrong, unless his statement was tongue in cheek. Obviously not all of any one people, whether Afghan or Iraqi or Iranian are evil. In fact, the real people in these countries are thrilled that they are starting to build a democracy — by themselves. (Well, Iran isn’t, but that’s not for a lack of desire by the non-ruling class.)
We shouldn’t stop hunting Osama Bin Laden until he is in a grave.
Anonymous, Torkel wrote his statement presumably as an example of how the media and those in power like to portray groups of people in order to gain support for some policy or other. With regard to the Iraqi threat, and despite the documented use of chemical weapons before the first Gulf War (about which questions should be directed to Mr Rumsfeld, I believe), after a decade of sanctions (with a huge humanitarian cost) the Iraqi state was in no position to seriously pursue the weapons programmes concerned. Although one obviously has to be cautious about what happened to the materials involved in such programmes, this didn’t provide enough of a selling point for the US and British administrations, and so we ended up with the now-famous “45 minute” claim [1] which was later shown to be absurd. Meanwhile, materials of a similarly worrying nature managed to float around in the USA quite freely [2] – again, something quite useful for propaganda purposes, if you take the cynical view.
Note that none of this is a commentary on the state of Iraqi society before or after the second Gulf War. Indeed, the decision to go to war was based on that “credible threat” of yours, not on ostensibly humanitarian reasons, although people do like to frame it in the latter way now that the original story doesn’t stick. Perhaps people would have supported the campaign if humanitarian reasons had been given as the principal reason for action, but if that were the motivation of an administration, there would be plenty of other countries to choose from besides Iraq. And I can’t help feeling that there would have been a general indifference to such action, anyway, especially given the glacial progress towards resolving other well-known humanitarian crises.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1326054,00.html
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/anthrax/story/0,,719367,00.html