September 11, (2001/2012)

I just read something that a friend wrote about 9/11, and it made me want to write something about it myself today, on the 11th anniversary of the day. 

When 9/11 happened, I was a senior in high school. I was in post-secondary, so I had some college classes. One of them happened to be a political science course called "Current World Problems” - a class whose topic was terrorism. This class was scheduled and I was signed up for it long before September 11th, back when nobody really talked much about terrorism. It was a strange coincidence. 

I know it’s not going to sound very nice when I say this, but when everything happened on that day, I had a strange feeling that “we” deserved this - not “we” as in ordinary U.S. citizens, but “we” as a nation whose foreign policy has so often been short-sighted, arrogant and brazenly self-serving. Often bringing war or supporting oppressive regimes as it suited our “needs” at the time... participating in clandestine operations in South America and other places... where did the Taliban get the weapons and the training, anyway? Oh, that’s right - it was from us. We trained them, armed them, used them for our purposes, then dumped them to fend for themselves when we were through. I consider myself a pacifist, and don’t believe that the murder of innocent people is every justified, but at the same time I could see why some populations would have good reason to be angry with the United States. 

I am not going to say that these feelings were right or wrong; I don’t know what I would feel if this event happened today instead of 11 years ago. This is simply how I felt at 17 years old, when this stuff was happening. It was a crazy introduction to the "real" world of politics I had at that age. Still very young, I was reading a lot about politics already, and could see that if I had to choose between the two, I would lean toward the Democratic Party. I remember having a debate in Social Studies class in which my group members and I defended our choice of Al Gore for President. A few months later, I watched as Al Gore won the popular vote and should have won an election which was then usurped in a series of shady maneuvers. 

Then 9/11, which in my young, idealistic mind I thought might be a real lesson, a wake-up call to our country about our foreign policy. Maybe all the lives that were lost on September 11 wouldn’t be in vain if we could really look at this stuff: is it a problem that there is a whole section of the world which bitterly hates us? The United States has some great PR people, what are some (non-violent) ways we could start to kind of turn around our reputation in the world? Well, probably invading Iraq wasn’t the best idea. I couldn’t even believe it was happening when we went into Iraq. I was 17 years old, and I could see these two things were not related. I wasn't happy about the invasion of Afghanistan, but at least there was some connection. But Iraq? Why was this happening? I think we are still trying to figure out the true answer to that question.

Later, gearing up for the first presidential election I would actually be able to vote in (2004), I got involved in College Democrats, putting loads of time into campaigning for John Kerry - anything to avoid another four years of George W. Bush! The election that year was extremely close, and involved all sorts of stupid, petty mudslinging. I can't even remember all the ridiculous details anymore. Anyway, the election came down to my state, Ohio, and in the bitter end, George Bush II was re-elected. "Really? Are you serious?", I thought. Four years later, Bush would leave us in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

“Really? Are you serious?” pretty much sums up my reaction to most U.S. Politics, both then and now. Every once in a while, it’s expressing my surprise that something positive actually happened, but 9 times out of 10, it’s the opposite.  Over the past 10 years, it’s gone from bad to worse, especially with the current presidential race and its comedy of lies, and things going on in Ohio at the state and local level. Still, I can’t believe that nothing good will ever happen, so I keep tuning in and keep voting. Right now I might prefer to live in a foreign country where things seem a little saner or at least I can go to the doctor without going broke, but I have faith somehow that insanity will always be checked in the end - sometimes I just wonder how long it will take. 

When I think about 9/11, I think about a scary day and a great tragedy for many families, but I also think about the hope I had that maybe we will start to become more conscious of the way we operate in the world. Right now I am also thinking about 2012, and how some people say that the Mayans didn’t necessarily mean that the world would end in 2012, but that human consciousness would enter a new phase. That will always be my hope, that we as humans are slowly evolving into a better version of ourselves. It’s probably necessary for things to get really ugly so we can see that what we're doing isn't working. 

Someone whose wisdom I trust once told me that “the only thing that causes a person to change is their own pain”- and I believe that’s true for people as a species as well as individuals. Of course, I hope this doesn’t mean that each individual on the planet must experience intolerable pain in his or her life before anything begins to change. Instead, maybe we can achieve this through what Albert Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion”. The word compassion in English comes from Latin, and means, literally “to suffer together with”. As we develop our sense of compassion, the suffering of other living things becomes our own suffering. Feeling the pain of other people and of the planet as our own, we begin to change accordingly. 

"Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison [the optical delusion of self] by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty...We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."  
- Albert Einstein

I hope we are headed in that direction.