On One of the Darkest Days in the History of Ourkind and the Present State of the Darkness That Followed:

First published on September 11, 2021 on Thomas Paine’s Facebook Page

It wasn’t just the scale of death. More people have died in other events.

Natural disasters, wars, genocides, pandemics have all killed more.

But there’s a difference when it happens all at once, out of nowhere, when the cause is done by humans, and the crime is witnessed by the world.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities at a far greater scale, targeting civilians, but also, they occurred during a war between nations, to end a war. This was different.

A common misconception is that 9/11 was an attack on America, when it was an attack on all of ourkind. People from over 90 countries died that day. Business from all over the world worked out of the Twin Towers. They wanted to attack America, but it was an attack on the world.

They sent their people to die. They knew this attack would bring more strife to the Muslim world. They only acted out of suicidal insanity, to bring death for themselves, the people they claimed to support, and to the rest of the world.

Nearly 3000 people died that day. Only 19 of them had any idea of what was coming. The rest were simply going about their Tuesday morning.

It’s not easy to rank tragedy. Death is death. But the impact of those deaths on the living depends on the circumstances. A child’s death hurts more than a grandparent. That morning the world witnessed nearly 3000 first degree murders. Hundreds of regular people had to jump to their deaths because the heat was simply too much to bear. All of the victims’ families had to find a way to go on, without a trial, without justice, most without ever seeing the remains of their loved ones.

(7 Days In September — YouTube
Who Was the Falling Man from 9/11? — Esquire
Twenty Years Gone: Grief and Conspiracy 20 Years After 9/11 — The Atlantic)

Tragedy is tough to compare, but the scale of the attack on September 11, 2001 still seems elusive. We aren’t fit to intellectualize the scale. We felt it at the time. But we didn’t understand it. We tried to make sense of it. We tried to move forward, but we never truly dealt with what happened.

It’s as if those 19 hijackers each murdered 150 people, all in one morning, in full view of the world. No other event in the history of ourkind is on par with 9/11.

Perhaps the tragedy’s scale was made difficult to understand by the amount of civilian heroes who died trying to save others. It’s tough to compare the tragedy of a regular person who died to someone who ran into a building trying to save others. Hundreds of everyday heroes died that day, but far more regular people had their life ended, simply by chance of location.

Perhaps the tragedy left such a mark on us because of how it was executed. The second plane hit while we were all looking, then the collapses, all repeated endlessly on the screens. The disaster and aftermath seared into our collective memories. No terrorist attack has ever been executed so precisely to make such a large impact on all of humanity.

Perhaps the tragedy was made to feel otherized for those who didn’t have a loved one who died. How can one grieve when the dead aren’t family? How does one grieve for humanity as a whole? But the event was so large, that even those not directly connected to a victim felt it. It hit us all.

Perhaps the tragedy was left ambiguous because we had no national leadership at the time. That day, no one remembers anything about President Bush’s comments. They remember him being visibly scared while sitting with children, and in a bunker. It wasn’t until days later he first found a way to connect with people, but did so in the most hideous manner, by connecting to our desire for revenge.

Perhaps the tragedy was warped by television. We all watched hours of it, and very quickly, a nationalistic jingoism took hold, that was then used to bring out the worst of America. A weird mix of corporate Christian patriotism became the norm, turning blind allegiance into something almost resembling a religion, that the networks and papers held fast to. It’s tough to mourn, reflect, and eventually accept tragedy when we’re not allowed to ask questions, but having our focus always redirected at enemies.

Perhaps the tragedy being so quickly blamed on a religion made it more difficult to understand. Most Americans know very little about Islam, so it’s no wonder so many believed the most horrible things so many were saying about the Koran and Muslims. We, by nature, fear what we don’t understand, and when so many xenophobic warmongers start putting the blame on a religion, many simply don’t know how to question it. How do you focus on the grief, and not anger, when the cause is made to seem too clear?

And through all of this, perhaps the greatest tragedy is how our leaders used the event to pursue a path to becoming the evil we previously deplored. From torture, to purposeless wars killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, to total surveillance, further normalizing racism, militarization of local police, treating protests as treason, America quickly degenerated into a petty and fearful nation. Discussing truth became tantamount to sedition. Where we now needed to proudly proclaim one’s love for America, or you were with the terrorists! Luckily the fever eventually broke, but we are still living with the after effects of this terrible disease.

In many ways, the xenophobia got worse, ignorance became a political ideology, Christian nationalism has been normalized, normalized fear of a mysterious and unspecified threat opened society to being vulnerable to those out to use our fears for their ends, be it of foreign governments, grifters or homegrown fascists.

We never made sense of it all. We moved on. We changed. Despite the slogans, we simply forgot.

Grief is tough to deal with. Forgetting is often the way people deal, and it does bring solace. But the hole still remains. It isn’t until it is replaced with understanding that one truly moves on. Without making sense of it, without fully grasping the darkest day in the history of humankind, one cannot begin to understand it.

Understanding is commonly confused with explaining. Conspiracy theories grow from that. How does one understand that a small group of foreign nationals killed so many? Is it not easier to think that a group of evil politicians, all the politicians who you already don’t trust and don’t like, planned it all? It offers an explanation, and can make it all so easy to understand. Buildings don’t just fall, they are demolished. Our military headquarters isn’t just attacked, it’s targeted by a missile as a pretext for war. It makes it all seem so much simpler. It makes it all make so much sense.

Chomsky once said an interesting thing about 9/11 conspiracies. It was something to the effect of: conspiracy theories redirect those who would be outraged at the administrations wars and incompetence and nefarious public agenda by delegitimizing themselves by getting them to focus on bizarre theories that are simply fiction. September 11th happened on the Bush Administration’s watch. The greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world, and hardly anyone blames them. They had so many opportunities, but they focused on other priorities, they ignored the warnings yelled at them from the top intelligence agencies in the country. Yet they get no blame. If those focused on absurd conspiracy theories focused on undisputed facts, their true incompetence would be how that administration would be remembered. Instead, they just parrot ignorance.

Because true understanding means dealing with a great many difficult issues, we, as a nation, never took that path. We never truly reckoned with our history of exploiting people in foreign lands. We never reckoned with the negative externalities of what the World Trade Center represented to the world, especially those in far off lands who felt exploited by modern capitalism.

When you look at the true reasons bin Laden attacked America, and you put aside their anti-Semitism, butchered interpretation of religion, and feigned empathy for the Palestinian cause, you realize their tangible demands are pretty reasonable: stop having your military and corporations exploit the world. It’s their path to achieving it that makes them terrorists, because, in the end, they are simply terrible people that pervert a religion to justify their pathological narcissism. But their tangible complaints are the same complaints people across the world have, especially at home. But America, as a country, so often refuses to look in the mirror until the very last possible moment.

True understanding of what led us here requires going back thousands of years. The history of the world and our current situation isn’t something one can fully explain in a speech or a television special or even an undergraduate semester. It’s simply not that simple. These things aren’t black and white. But when we see death at this scale, we seek a way to understand. We seek an explanation. Good vs Evil. Right vs Wrong. Us vs Them. Though this makes us feel content, it will never be so simple. Human beings and the history of our societies aren’t like that.

But what we got was the “axis of evil” which was so simplistic and so silly, it diminished every bit of understanding we as a country needed. Then we got the Iraq War, which again, was so extremely exploitative of everyone involved. In just those first two years after the tragedy, the Bush Administration launched two wars, the first a fruitless attempt at nation building, the second being based on known lies for no purpose related to the tragedy. It lost us any good will, and will forever be remembered as how America lost the first decade of the 21st century.

The enormity of the tragedy was at such a scale, the world was split into two eras, pre and post 9/11.

Yet we, as a nation, have never reckoned with it. We simply moved on. We forgot. 20 years into this era and we, as a nation, are still coming to terms with what happened and what we did in its aftermath.

(After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong — The Atlantic
‘I Helped Destroy People’ — The New York Times)

And in retrospect, it is quite understandable why America reacted the way we did. A people lulled into complacency from the prosperity of the 1990s were not ready for such a shock. We collectively freaked out, forced to realize the dream we were living was not real. We previously elected a man we wanted to have a beer with, even if he was a recovering alcoholic. We didn’t elect a War President, or even one who pretended to be competent. We didn’t think it mattered. We bought into the false ideas cultivated on Madison Avenue working for clients on Wall Street. We were not ready to undertake the enormous responsibility that was thrust upon us when the moment hit. So we became cynical. We became focused on what we saw on our screens, not felt in our hearts. We looked for comfort in the known, the easy, the past. We didn’t rise to the moment, but succumb to our fears.

But our failure in those months and years after does not need to define us forevermore. We can have this consolation with us, that we have it in our power to begin our world over again. The hell we created will not be easily conquered, but the harder our conflict, the more glorious the triumph. Freedom always demands a high price from those privileged to have it. It would be strange indeed if something so valuable was truly easy to possess.

We need to live our ideals. We need not embrace the evil they wanted to cultivate in us, but use what we’ve learned to grow into better people. We need not look to the television or politicians or celebrities, but to ourselves, our friends, our neighbors, our experts — not those educated by YouTube or Wikipedia, but who dedicated years of their life in the pursuit of knowledge. We can look to building our society, our world, in pursuit of what is best for all ourkind.

Exploiting weaker people for our own benefit always creates harm, and even if one can get away with it for some time, it weakens society as a whole. To build a better world, we each need to act in ways that create a better future, and not excuse actions that exploit the weak and vulnerable. On September 11th and the days after, we saw countless acts of courage, that shows, even in the face of insurmountable tragedy, the human spirit remains strong. In the face of our insurmountable challenges, we can look to those acts of selfless courage for actions we take in our own life in pursuit of a better tomorrow.

Fear brought us all down. But when we turn that fear into understanding, we can use it to grow. We can just sit with what we now know. And then we begin again. Let the past 20 years be a lesson in how we must grow. And now, we begin again.

Added on September 12, 2021

Perhaps the hardest truth to accept is that the terrorists succeeded. Not only on that day, but in the years that have followed. 9/11 was a resounding success for the terrorists. They achieved everything they wanted. They exposed the dysfunction of American institutions — the government and the corporations — to the world. We, as a country, responded with nationalism, hate, needless war, profiteering, and torture. The facade of American exceptionalism was done away with.

And yes, individuals, the majority of the people, responded by wanting to help, by wanting to do the right things, but our institutions were not fit for the moment. While individuals ran into buildings to save others, our institutions didn’t encourage the same selflessness in our attempts to address the root cause of the sentiments where the terrorism perpetrated against us grew out of. We wasted money needed for our society at home on wars abroad. Efforts of the people were redirected from doing good to causing more strife. Nationalism creates division, which was not needed in the days after. And all these years later, that division at home has only grown.

It was not a war. It was not an attack on a nation, but an attack on the world, all of ourkind. They wanted a war between Islam and America, and our institutions embraced that framing. But the attack was simply a few smart and psychotic people exploiting a weakness they found in America. It had nothing to do with religion, it’s just how the psychotic assholes justified their behavior.

How we responded boosted the terrorists into a threat far beyond what they were, let them craft the narrative, and simply helped them achieve their goals. The most perfectly executed terrorist attack in the history of ourkind achieved everything they wanted. To grow, we must accept these truths, so we can begin again.