In grand scheme, 9/11 no big deal

As I traveled to work on NYC subways this morning, I was struck by the singularity of the people around me: reading their own material, fussing with their make-up, dozing, people watching, reading the adverts in the subway car, and just simply staring into space – caught up in their own worlds. If I should have penetrated their minds, I may have discovered some thought about the tragedy of September 11, but to all outward appearances and since I didn’t possess the ability to delve into the shadowy realms of the hundreds of New Yorkers on the subways, it was just another day – business as usual.

Yes, over the last few days the media has beat us over our heads with emotive provoking stimulations of an anniversary of a tragedy. Notwithstanding it truly was a tragedy. But for each person who survives the death of a loved one, for them it is a tragedy – at that moment. But, like the Japanese in their Zen-like philosophy, a certain period is set aside for grieving and mourning death. After that set period has passed, it’s resuming life as to as close of an approximation of normalcy.

Six years later, the media and politicians have once again forced a nation to reopen the wounds of a tragedy – to relive in gruesome detail the events of September 11, 2001. How many of the survivors, I wonder, would like to move on? To file the passing of their loved one in that compartment in their minds which nature has created to help save us from a loop that is a constant reliving leading to insanity?

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, CBS anchor Dan Rather in an interview with the BBC said that that prevailing climate in America was that anyone who had a different opinion to the government could be considered unpatriotic. Still today, six years later, except for a recent ruling by a federal judge in New York City who ruled that a section of the Patriot’s Act that dealt with the infamous NSA letters is unconstitutional, everyone is still towing the patriotic line and not daring to speak up. Why is it then, that for those who dare speak up they are not given voice, as expected in a democracy, but branded, shunned or ignored as irrelevant and unpatriotic? Is there no one who would dare speak out against the king’s new clothes – that he is in fact naked, misinformed, ignorant, reckless and should be held accountable for war crimes?

Is American narcissism so all consuming that they ignore the millions whose deaths they have caused worldwide? Six years later, how about the hundreds of thousands who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of US forces? Haven’t those people had to pick themselves up and move on? Who celebrates them, who weeps for them and who mourns for them?