19 Men

I should be writing term papers but this is on my mind...

On September 11, 2001 nineteen men hijacked three planes two of which hit the world trade center buildings, one crash-landed in Pennsylvania, and one crashed into the Pentagon. Thousands were killed. It was (as far as I know) the largest fatality rate in any modern terrorist act and set the stage for the situation the US is in today -- not so much the financial part but the two wars part.

Khalid Almihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf Alhazmi, Salem Alhazmi, Hani Hanjour (AA flight #77); Satam M.A. Al Suqami, Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail M. Alshehri, Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari (AA flight #11); and Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri (AA flight #175); and Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi, Ahmed Alnami, and Ziad Samir Jarrah (UA flight #93) participated in the attacks that occurred on US soil over seven years ago.

These are 19 men. They are murderers by the standards of some and martyrs by the standards of others.

Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado made a statement at one point referring to the people who worked in the World Trade Center buildings at the time of the attack as equivalent to Adolf Eichmann who was a train engineer who delivered Jews to concentration camps in NAZI Germany and refused to admit that he had done anything wrong -- he turned a blind eye from the evils of his labor.

From every angle the 9/11 attacks have been analyzed: from Muslim fanatics, from Christian fanatics, from liberal scholars, conservative scholars, and everyone within and between those. We wage two wars based on the idea that we have to keep the world safe from more men like those. We are in billion dollars of debt because of those wars. The political climate of our nation has been deeply divided because of those wars. These things are just the beginning of how America has suffered from the terrorist attacks.

As as nation we have been angry, vengeful, sad, and scared.

Here's what's been on my mind: Those 19 men who terrorized our nation used to be somebody's boys. They used to run and play with their brothers and sisters. They used to have religious ceremonies and holidays with their families. Their mothers used to rock them to sleep at night when they were scared. Their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were so excited to live to see the day they were born. They rejoiced at their high school graduations and their college graduations. Many of them may even have had kids of their own. They were loved.

There are direct, intermediary, and precipitating causes for most things that happen in this world. A direct cause for these men bombing the WTCs was more than likely religious fanaticism. I want to remind us that this can happen to Christian Americans too -- think abortion clinics and Oklahoma City. This is inexcusable. An intermediary cause might be a book they read or a group of people they associated with while in high school or college. A precipitating cause may have been poverty, oppression, Arab-Israeli conflict, or some other kind of violence.

The fact is, they were not born this way. This side of them was created. If the average US citizen understood this, they might think twice about the fact that we're killing innocent people daily in Afghanistan. Maybe it is good that we rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein but it is certainly a cluster-fuck now.

The two wars that we are fighting might have been started under the guise of national security but I think we can all admit that lying below that was a sense of vengeance. We believed Bush that Iraq was involved in 9/11 because we were irate. We wanted blood. And whose blood did we get? Mostly civilians. Friends I knew since childhood have been changed forever because of those wars. They used to be great guys.

When we are killing kids, women, old folks, and innocent men, what is it that we're proving?

I guess my point is this: what if, instead of hoping for success in either of these wars we were to admit that the problem lies somewhere within the Western construct of society. If we were to admit that our way of conducting civilization is not 100% right we might still have to fight these two wars in order to save people from tyranny, but we might also be able to bring down the tyranny that is taking over our society and leading use to agree that killing children is necessary.

Killing children is what "the enemy" does. We're better than that.

I don't really have answers, just questions for this one