Alright. 9/11. We all know what that represents. Well at least in America it has a direct meaning. An event that changed everybodys lives forever. It hasn't been yet 10 years, and for a lot of people the sting is still very much there. And for many it won't ever go away. Now I find it interesting that 9/11 happened in the 1st year of the New Millenium. It was like that event said; "This won't be a normal century by any measure." So be prepared. I read some articles a while back and it was pointing out certain things people were talking about the months before 9/11. Very interesting real progressive stuff and they were showing that once the event took place most if not all of these things went to the back burner and faded away. I was watching a certain show a couple of years ago and a woman was making a similar statement. She was talking about how the event drastically changed the way people operate and things people talk about. Essentially they were making a point that our attention has been diverted so much. I have to agree and I think the sensitivity has been raised. I feel as though there is a wavelength of chaos that entered the fray once that event happend. Not literal chaos but like the Chaos Card entered the deck of our everyday life. Like anything could go down after that. I mean lets be honest it really threw a monkey wrench into everything.
Everybody knows where they were when they first heard about it. So I guess I should write where I was. Well I was in school....of course. Unless I was skipping lol. Nah I was in school. The day started off like any other normal day. It got around to 2nd period and the class hadn't even went on that long until one of my teachers ran and got a T.V. to see what was happening in New York. I was like "The Twin Towers, thats supposed to be like some bank building right." I didn't know exactly what they were but, I knew they were important. So we watched the news coverage for the rest of class. Then as class was over I went to my next class and the teacher was playing the coverage on T.V. By this time I had grown dull of the coverage and rested on my desk in the Type - A style that every student in America does. I was actually the only person in class with their head down. But I didn't care about the coverage. I was just ready to go home already. I know that sounds cold but, I really didn't care. In those days I had zero interest in people or anything that wasn't involved in my daily life. I knew the event was going to have an effect on mine and everyones life. But it was only going to affect me in an indirect way and I knew that and thats why I didn't care.
So what I noticed immediately was the intense dislike and distrust for alot of Arab people. People were really angry at Arabs in general and we all know that started what I like to call the terrorist lenses. People started to have a percentage ratio on who could be a terrorist. I've seen some and heard some terrible things dealing with this subject. Then it started a lot of faux patriotism with the whole flags on cars and in front of peoples houses. I mean it was faux patriotism. Freedom Fries anyone? So yeah, I noticed this almost immediately. I was like why are all these people posting up flags on their cars and all this bull? Most of them weren't doing any of that before 9/11 so whey are they doing it now. Uh that won't stop the terrorist from blowing up whatever you think they want to blow up. And within a year or two most of the flags were taken down and the "patriotism" subsided. Look if I'm a patriot then I'm a patriot 24/7. If I'm going to represent anything than I'll represent it all the time, and to the fullest. And we all know it goes past just 'representing.' But yeah that whole wave of "patriotism" really bothered me. I felt like a lot it was a bit silly. Even though I am sure there were some genuine patriotism taking place among all the fricas.
But yeah, back to the kind of climate that was instilled after the event. It set a lot of things in motion. The news coverage drastically changed. It was like always focused on overseas issues. If it wasn't some Arab country it was somewhere overseas. The few years after the event it was like the news was all the same. Talking about a foreign country, showing a foreign country, should we go to war with said foreign country. I mean it all ran together to me. After that we decided to go to war and I still don't know what we are doing over there. But thats not what I am writing about. I'm writing about the effects of 9/11. Then after we decided to go to war, it seems like we've been on some whatever kind of stuff. Like everybodys going on with their lives but, there is still a large cloud of uncertainty with the future and our role in it. Whether that be as a Man, a Woman, a worker, activist, your race, religion, whatever. And that seems like a natural reaction to what has taken place. I mean you have to think, somethng like that hasn't happened since Pearl Harbor and that was in Hawaii. So even though it was decimating it wasn't like being hit inside the United States, in a major city at that.
So many things got put on the back burner. We stopped talking about a lot of things or it wasn't "hip" or en vogue to talk about certain things. Then the government intiated stuff like the Patriot Act and other type of stuff where people can be "looked into" for the simplest of things. Your name got too many syllables, a little too ethnic, or you travel a lot. Chances are your on somebodys list. I mean they've got babies, literally babies on certain lists for GOD knows what. Its' gotten a little ridiculous. There began to enter a strong sense of political correctness that I frankly have not seen before. I mean things began to become really tame and so much stuff was just glossed over. Though I have to say America as a whole are probably the number 1 gloss over uh overs lol. I mean its almost sinister the way certain things have infiltrated mainstream society. It's like fuck it lets just go with the flow. Well "going with the flow" is alright to survive in society, but when it turns into passivity simply for the sake of not stepping on anyones toes well then thats when we start to lose ground and it turns into an extreme act. Yes you read it right Passiveness can be extreme just like agressiveness can get extreme. There is such a thing as being too passive. Its' like were forced to deal with two realities at the same time. There is the normal everday life one and then theres the post 9/ll climate that is looming that tells you that things aren't normal anymore. As if the climate of fear wasn't already great enough in America, I think 9/11 just added so much fear to the overall climate. Think how much terrorist stuff we've watched the past decade. I mean there have been actual terrorist events overseas and stuff, but thats always happened.
In closing I'm going to give a synopsis on how I currently view everything. Basically I think that 9/11 was a horrible event in the fact that it cost thousands of people their lives. America hasn't witnessed anything this horrific on a wide scale. It affected so many people and some won't ever truly recover. After the event a new kind of way of living was implemented. A lot of political correctness and rigidness became the norm. And you think that with all these cataclysmic events happening that we would become a bit more, I don't know defensive. You know a bit more sharper. But instead there was just more fear implemented. The fact that 9/11 happened and a lot of Americans are still interested in the same old B.S. kind of bothers me. Its' like a lot of America still lives in this contained state where the rest of the world is peripheral. We are trying to keep a system going that for the most part is proving to be contradictory, unsustainable, and empty. There needs to be a complete overhaul of like everything. And this can only be achieved through a simple identification. Either you want to make America a better place or your just here to live your life and hope for the best. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to this just recognizing.
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