9/11: Reconciling with Living Ghosts:

Building on top of words, on top of other’s words, moving around statements to the point that one cannot fully cite and quote, for now the terms have enmeshed from their original intent. But still holding on in someway the mere idea of an essence, of a collective identity, a rolling discourse of common surface for a higher theme of purpose.

Those who assume that everything that takes place in one country in isolation, which is torn by class struggle, does not think past borders. But beyond the oceans and the waves is far more than daily consumption. A great wall cannot work in the 21^st Century as in China centuries prior; especially now with social media networks, nor just the passing influence of computer screens.

There is no such thing as ‘destiny’, ‘nature’ or ‘essence’, but living structures, caught up, sometimes frozen within historic-cultural limits, which intermingle with the historical scene to such a degree that it has long been impossible and is still difficult to think or even imagine something else (Helene Cixous).

“Men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations” complex and null, tied up tight in conceptualized yet penetrable routines.

Here is a good question to ask the president, or any representative of the federal government or even the common citizen (an echo from Native Americans such as Wounded Knee), How can people recover or heal themselves without reconciliation, without apology, and without addressing the crime? … the process of allowing those whose pain is not healed to begin a dialogue is critical to building a healthy nation. It is a process still foreign to the United States, but there is always hope for truth, hope for peace” (Winona LaDuke).

For the past hundred years, Muslims were defeated, massacred, robbed of their land and wealth, of their life and hope. They were doubled-crossed, colonized and exploited; proselytized and forcefully or bribefully converted, and they were secularized, westernized and de-Islamized by internal and external agents … and all this happened in every corner of the Muslim world. … Now he is the object of hatred and contempt (Ziauddin Sardar).

If we take steps to reconcile the past, perhaps those who have harmed us, will do the same. Otherwise, western society will never be civil, but only infantile and revenge seeking, unjust rather than just.

A healing process is necessary for forging a better tomorrow. But we are still attacking. As June Jordan discusses in her essays Technical Difficulties, Thank you America for my parents sake, for the immigrant life her parents lived, after seeking refuge in the US, but as an American citizen in the 1960’s, June Jordan wanted something more. She wanted a society that did not have a double standard; she wanted a society that did not burn Vietnamese alive, bomb Japanese, massacre Native Americans. She thanks America for what it had offered her immigrant parents, but she was ready for the next step to true ideals: a democracy that holds itself accountable.

Amilcar Cabral once stated: "Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head." Our ideas and our ideals are great, but our reality is harsh. In order to make a healthy future, we must reconcile our past and our present. If we care for justice, if we care to set things to a level of civility, if we want to understand why violence was the first response rather than the last response, we must create a local, a national and a global dialogue to address the pain and injustice.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “Consciencism conceives matter as a plenum of tensions giving rise to dialectical change … and since tension implies incipient change, matter must have power of self-motion … Without self-motion dialectical change would be impossible.” Society will depict itself either as ‘forces of progress’ or as ‘forces of reaction’, and when we think of progress, it must not come at the expense of others.

The need for a paradigm shift in our thinking is necessary. Our debate is confined by narrow parameters. We have the power within us to create the world anew. We need to see that we can solve our problems only by first creating a new concept of citizenship (Grace Lee Boggs). The important thing for us to do is to see ourselves not as oppressed victims, or objects of corporate government schemes, or feeding into media propaganda, but to see ourselves as creative subjects.

Men like Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Dick Cheney have no guilt for the lives that they have destroyed: American or Other. They each have published books to gloat their display of barbaric bravery, like some warrior from the dark ages. And though the current Obama administration sees the route to the future by ignoring the past, even if we ignore it, it will keep coming back to haunt us.