10 YEARS AFTER 9/11

Magazines and newspapers on sale have begun to cover the upcoming ten-year mark of September 11, 2001. I can only step back and reflect on where I stand today since this was the most significant event in American history to have happened inside the US in my lifetime. There is a solid difference between History and Memory. I won’t delve here into theories and conspiracies or even media propaganda. History regardless of who decides what gets written into textbooks always has a way of coming out as time moves away from the event. Facts always float to the surface.

Personally: How have I lived my own life since then? I certainly moved from one phase in my life to another. I graduated from a liberal arts college several months prior to September. I was no longer a child and no longer naïve. My sheltered knowledge of reality outside the middle-class bubble was clearly not sustainable.

I no longer was required to be in the classroom. A well-standard education was complete. Yet the job market was already slim in 2001. I was in New York, and couldn’t get work. So I decided to go camp out in the Everglades for a month and learn about nature. En route my cousin had an application for the Peace Corps that she was not using, so I filled out the application while I was in the swamp.

Before the year ended, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa. I wanted to meet people that I would never have met otherwise, and I did. My understanding about human nature and life were broadened and awakened. My strongest reason to work in another country was my deep-need to counter-balance the image the US military was spreading of America. While I was primarily a teacher in a remote village, I was the real student.

The real world is harsh. I had always been passionate about human rights due to my grandparents surviving the Holocaust. But my time in Malawi gave me first-hand experience in how the poorest of the poor struggle to live. I saw how many challenges my female and male students had to face on a daily basis, and I became a feminist. I became an advocate, a teacher, and an activist. I saw how most well to do Americans take our opportunities and freedoms for granted.

I couldn’t just look at the world the same way again. I had to ask vigorous questions. I had to learn about history on a much wider and broader margin of understanding. When I was in high school, I did not read much history. Most of my history teachers were football or track coaches, and I always felt that they portrayed history as another sport, a mere game.

After my life-changing experience in Malawi, I remained reflective of 9/11. I was invigorated to do more than just the practical job. I grew very skeptical of my government and the wars. Still today, many of my fellow Americans won’t question the events, or who or why the attack happened, and why should we trust the very Bush-Cheney government investigation to the event, when the two heavily tied to business cronies, had lied to the public on countless occasions to go into false wars and deregulate big business.  

I debated about which Masters program I wanted to go to. I eventually found myself in the Netherlands, in The Hague, the same city as the International Criminal Courts and at the same time Milosevic was on trial for his genocide in the Balkans. I was at a small school studying with people from over fifty different nations. I became a citizen of the world. I became friends with people from all religious, ethnic, and national affiliations and I learned about real people from real places.

I primarily studied International Political Economy and Human Rights. I argued with any professor who only discussed economics but failed to include the social repercussions to economic policy. I not only learned about what the most powerful governments and corporations were doing globally. I began to understand more and more why so many individuals outside the US loved the ideas of democracy and freedom, but that in their very own countries my own government and corporations had been falling short on our ideals through invasion, shifty trade deals, assisting military coups, or dumping our trash in their front yards.  

History became a food for me. Rather than just learning history for trivia or sport, I began to read history in order to not allow others more powerful to manipulate me with propaganda, whether it was George Bush or Barak Obama. I have read history books from the far Left to the far Right, and of course the more I learned the more Left I became. I read history so that I can build new directions of understanding and to make change.

I learned that 9/11 was not a single event that can stand on its own. The US and British oil interests in the Middle-East is a significant part in understanding the attack. My government and corporations have been unjustly exploiting the region throughout the 20^th Century and the British have been there even longer.

In regards to 9/11, we supposedly think we know most of the details. But perhaps in thirty years from now, we will be able to understand more. Yet even the Kennedy and King assassinations are still out of factual acceptance. It may take even longer. But facts always float to the surface over time.

There is no justification for violence, and there is no just war, or right to passage. As Howard Zinn always promoted, just because one country is a democracy and another is not, does not give the democracy more right to inflict suffering on to others through bombs and fear.

Over the past ten years, I have been fortunate to have worked and traveled in countries like Kosovo, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malawi, and more. Rather than fearing people that I don’t understand, I reach out and begin to learn from them, and realize how much we care about the same basic principles of human dignity. I learn that there are good people with good intentions everywhere.   

Currently at this time in 2011, the Martin Luther King Jr, Memorial is completing construction. Some people will think that the timing is ironic for being near to the 10 years since 9/11.  Of course, there will be propaganda. But yesterday, Cornel West mentioned in an interview that Martin Luther King Jr, would not be happy in seeing a monument in his name representing a symbol, rather than actual freedom and liberty.

Tavis Smiley reflects that it is one thing to admire a memorial; it is another thing to address the methodology. The issues of poverty in the US and overseas is clearly connected to the level of capitalistic imbalances and that corporations have been no friend to compassion and freedom; unless that freedom is for everyone being free to be exploited.

I am no longer naïve as I had been before 9/11. I am not fearful nor am I going to resort to stereotyping those who I have never met. I will ask hard questions and remain skeptical until I believe otherwise that violence and injustice is not man’s healthiest friend or best route. It is never justified with revenge, especially if it is used against innocent people during wartime and when we are at so-called peace. As Rousseau once stated: there is a difference between freedom and peace; Peace comes at the expense of other people, Freedom is a constant battle to end exploitation in all its forms.