Reflections on a Tuesday morning....

[Guest RushNY]

OK guys its been a while since i have been here and poking around it seems that things might hve changed a little but here goes,My question is obvious do you think things have changed since 9/11 ,if so have they changed for the better or worse,do you still agree with what is going on ,i remember an awful lot of differing opinions at the time have they changed,do the guys here in NYC still feel that the city has changed ,going about my job here i still truly believe that the city has mellowed somewhat(although that just could be me-those drugs were damn good:)

I am doing this as i am interested in what fellow New Yorkers and also what people in different cities and communities across the USA think,personally since that time my views on what we need to do to wipe out the menace that we might face has changed,at the time i wanted us to wipe those who harbored the people who did this off the face of the planet but now i feel that the government are using what happened as part of an agenda to get rid of the undesireables in the world,something that the people of America and those around the world would not tolerate if the events here had not had happened.

The only good thing to come out of the action we have taken is that the people in Afghanistan now have the possibility of freedom but would of America and the other countries who helped defeat the Taleban have helped if the WTC attack had not have happened,i dont think so ,the events on that day opened the eyes of a lot of people here in the US ,that there are countries and people who hate the USA bad enough to do something like this and that no matter how powerful we seem to think we are it happened and over 2000 people lost their lives including people i knew and worked with ,some of you who are long time posters will know what i went through and i thank all of you at the time who took time out to help me with your kind thoughts and words i truly believe that it helped me a great deal and its not too much to say that it probably saved my life.Anyway not to dwell on the downside i would be interested to hear what you think.

[Houston Bonfires]

Here goes and God help me.

 

In very basic terms the "society" of the U S A owes the "societies" of the middle East approximately 230 trillion dollars for the rape of their petrochemical riches over the last seventy years. When we have paid back the theft we will see who the third world countries truly are and perhaps will be more tolerant toward the people of that region even indifferent as we are toward Africa.

I served proudly in the U S Military during the Vietnam conflict and I love this country dearly but I did not serve so that the Kenneth Lays and Jeff Skillings and the Fastows and Koppers of this world can continue the theft not only of money but ideologies on which this country originally was based.

I never condone violence of any nature and I am saddened by the loss of life on 9/11 and now I am more saddened by the greed with which the survivors of 9/11 and also Okla City have there hands held out demanding more money more money more money.

In a very real way my pessimistic view is kind of like Enron. We seem to have abandoned our "ethics" policy.:

[trilingual]

Hey, Rush --

 

Glad to see you back and to hear you're doing OK! (Hope things are OK with you and the BF, too!) Glad to know the meds helped, too! Isn't modern science wonderful? ;-)

 

Yeah, I think the world has changed, not just NY. When something like this happens, it reminds you of how precious life is, and how it could end in a flash, so it's important to make each day worthwhile. That tends to mellow almost anybody out! I mean, is it REALLY so important to catch the train every day and rush downtown to your routine job, or is it more important to be sure your days are filled with meaning?

 

Eventually, after a big tragedy like 9/11, people who weren't directly impacted tend to fall back into their old routines. Partly that's because it's comforting; it's a way of making the tragedy somewhat less real. That's much harder to do for people who directly experienced the disaster, like you did, but even then you're going to find life slowly returning to "normal." Even when it does, make sure every day counts!

 

I think you're right that nobody would have paid any attention to Afghanistan and the Taliban without the attack. For the Afghan people this ultimately will have been a good thing if they can keep the Taliban from coming back and can pull the country together. It's never going to be a rich country, probably, but before all this happened they seemed to have been reasonably content with their lives and maybe that can be the case again. By the way, I don't know if you saw the recent story in the Times, but I guess it's pretty common and open among the Pashtuns to have their boy toys! (That was a theme in the novel/Masterpiece Theater production "Jewel In The Crown," for those who remember it.) The nasty Taliban made that almost impossible; having a wall pushed over on you if you got caught tends to discourage a guy. Now the Taliban are gone and the fun is back! If only some of the trashier entertainments in NY would come back now that Giuliani is gone, the world would be even more perfect!

 

But getting back to the more serious for a moment, I think another good thing that came from 9/11 (even if it was at an almost unbearable cost) is that it awakened Americans to the fact that there's a world outside our borders and that there are a lot of people out there who don't necessarily love us or wish us well just because we've brought Coca-Cola and Big Macs to every corner of the planet. Americans have been so focused on our own affairs that we've ignored what our government and its policies do abroad, how that affects people's lives, and how they react to us. If 9/11 finally makes Americans realize we're part of a much wider world, that's a good thing. Being the only superpower left in the world isn't just a slogan, it's also a responsibility and one that has to be exercised very carefully. It's really easy for a country as powerful as the U.S. to be hurtful and harmful to other countries and peoples, even when we don't mean to be. Most of the time it happens because we've been completely self-centered and utterly thoughtless about the effects of what we do on other people (what, there are other people out there?). If 9/11 changes us, and makes us more careful and responsible as a nation and a people, and more aware of the world around us, then at least some good came of the tragedy.

 

A worrisome side of 9/11, to me, is that Bush & Co. are trying to use it to get a lot of their ultra-right-wing domestic stuff done under the radar screen while everyone's attention is focused on 9/11 and its aftermath. I really was afraid he was going to get away with it, but it's starting to look like our fellow Americans aren't that dumb. Of course, it took something the size of Enron to redirect their attention, but it seems to have done the trick. At least Bush isn't getting everything he wants, and there doesn't seem to be a Teflon effect going for him. Let's face it, they're only going to be able to get away with keeping people from remembering that he's basically dumb as a post for so long. Another silver lining to 9/11 is that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell managed to stick their feet into their mouths (up to their thighs) with their "it was homosexuality and feminism and stuff that made God bring this upon us" garbage. Even their right-wing pals were sickened by that, and denounced them, so their evil influence has been diminished.

 

Stay tuned, because we're just six months out from 9/11, and it's going to keep on having effects for a very long time, most of them unforeseeable. I can't predict if they'll be good or bad, but 9/11 did change the world and we're only barely starting to perceive some of the ways in which it was changed. We're condemned, in the words of the old Chinese curse, to live in interesting times! But sometimes we're only really ALIVE in interesting times. When everything's easy and we're complacent we tend to sleepwalk through our days in our little mindless routines. 9/11 was one hell of an alarm bell, and I don't think any of us are sleepwalking any more! And that's a good thing, too.

 

So, welcome back! It's good to know you're healing. And don't be a stranger! :-)

[trilingual]

Houston Bonfires --

 

Sorry, I don't agree that we owe the Middle East much of anything. The consuming countries actually paid billions (or trillions) over the years for the oil they bought. If there's a problem in that part of the world, it's the corrupt leadership there and the passive local populations who've mostly tolerated the state of affairs. (Of course, not all of them have. The Iranians got rid of the Shah, but we haven't exactly been happy with what replaced him!) Also, the oil-producing countries aren't exactly third-world. Most of them have fairly high standards of living, even if the societies are repressive by Western standards. Nobody is starving, medical care and education are available, and so are consumer trinkets galore.

 

The countries we owe are the forgotten ones in Africa, Asia and Latin America: the ones that don't have natural resources we want to buy and that we've just ignored as they sink farther into poverty. (We only pay attention when their desperate immigrants wash up on our shores.) We owe the countries where we've meddled unmercifully, like Angola and the Congo, or El Salvador and Nicaragua, and then abandoned them to decades-long wars we've basically ignored, while literally millions of poor people have died caught in the cross-fire and millions more have been maimed. We also owe countries that are the source of drugs, because if there weren't such an insatiable demand for them in the U.S., and such gargantuan profits to be made because of our making drug use illegal, those countries wouldn't have been ruined by narco-traffic and narco-terrorism. Countries like Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, and Peru, to name some obvious examples.

 

You're right though. The U.S. was founded on shining ideals. It's a shame we fail so often at living up to them, and we so rarely help other countries achieve what we have accomplished. Our current government, in particular, wouldn't lift a finger to help other countries of its own accord. If it hadn't been for 9/11 forcing them to pay attention to the world in spite of themselves, the big news these days would probably have been about how the Enron bail-out (at taxpayer expense) was going, and how the administration could find new ways to make the rich even richer!

[BgMstr4u]

This is a pretty global question, and it will have as many answers as people have points of view. I have spent quite a lot of time volunteering with the Red Cross and other agencies at the WTC site over the fall, and honestly had to pull back after December because it was getting to me.

 

I don't buy into the bash Bush agenda. I think he is a man of modest but adequate capacities who has put together a pretty good government (apart from Ashcroft) and who is managing fairly well in an entirely new arena for the US. The truth is that, whether or not they actually act on it again, the terrorists have created a new fact: the US can be attacked more or less anywhere, anytime. That's the new reality for this government or any government. I think Gore would be doing more or less exactly what Bush is doing, because it grows out of an objective situation.

 

I don't think Americans' attitudes have changed much, and I think, if anything, we have been too restrained in our international response. I think it is likely that Palestinian terrorist groups are as deeply involved in the WTC events as the Al Quaeda, but they are not as accessible to American military power as the more remote Afghanistan. To intervene in Palestine on that level would start a world war. The deep hatred of the US by Moslem extremists is a real fact, and has been for some time, and to pretend that we have the luxury of not defending outselves against this hatred, or that using some form of sweet reason and liberal balm will change their minds, is delusionary.

 

I think the most significant thing that has happened is that American policy makers have finally discovered that security matters. This is not about 20-somethings in fatigues and rifles pretending to guard airports. Much more important is the design of public works to avoid sabotage, the accessibility of critical systems to hostile intervention, maintaining secure communications, the identification of potential criminals, and tracking data which the government and others now will need to avoid trouble.

 

I think the real effect in the long run will be a much different approach to all these matters. As buildings are built, they will be more secure. The engineering lessons learned from the WTC will be applied. Safety codes will be rewritten and more vigorously (and expensively) applied. As utilities systems are rebuilt and updated, they will become more redundant and the water, gas, electricity, and other services they provide less vulnerable to shutdown. Roads, bridges, tunnels, will gradually be rebuilt to better engineering standards to make them less open to attack. Communications systems --telephone, radio, television, internet, etc., will all become more and more diffuse and redundant so that a single act will not be able to disrupt them significantly. At the same time, I think information about all kinds of things will become more accessible to law enforcement and other agencies, allowing much more rapid analysis of people and situations. Biological warfare possibilities will finally be taken seriously, and the nation's public health system, which was not in very good shape, will get a serious remake.

 

If there is an attitudinal change, it will be more along the lines of the British response to IRA bombing. Everyone will know it can happen, and ordinary people will find it easier and more socially acceptable to take sensible precautions. Immigration questions will begin to be seen as more complex, with differences seen between people who are here illegally because they have to find work to support their families and people who are here for other, less legitimate reasons. There will be a greater willingness to deport "students" and others who overstay their visas.

 

To my mind, this is the real "homeland security" agenda.