Five years ago today, 19 men orchestrated an attack to hi-jack four commercial flights. Two crashed into two landmark towers in New York City, the World Trade Center, which subsequently collapsed. One crashed into one side of the Pentagon in Virginia, destroying three of five rings. The last crashed in the middle of Pennsylvania thanks to the intervention of its passengers; it was believed to be heading for the White House or the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. Just under 3000 people died as a result of this attack.
This is all statistics. There’s no statistic describing exactly how much the US was affected. There’s no measure for how much those killed or injured are missing out, or how different the world might have looked today had they been alive and with normal vigor.
While other people might tell you to pray or to remember the accident, I won’t. I won’t pray because pray implies putting your life and faith in the hands of someone else. Our lives are already a function of the actions of other people, constantly dependent on history, and constantly shaping the potential for the future, for good and for bad. Some might say that it’s wrong to call what the attackers practiced “religion”, and I’d be inclined to agree, but most major religions today have been guilty of much the same thing in the past albeit on a wider scale. (Sweden was converted to Christianity without having much of a say in the matter, and the status of the woman as a capable human being was downgraded almost immediately. Let’s not forget about the crusades.) I do not honestly believe that organized religion does more good than bad, nor do I believe that if religion was to be dismantled, these assholes wouldn’t invent another concept to hide behind in order to do what they do. The real pricks will always be there, but we can stop instigating them.
I won’t remember the accident because there’s no need. We’re living in the aftermath of it, and the world climate that it has helped set the tone for (but which largely was the same the days before) is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. So if we won’t pray and we won’t remember, what will we do? The textbook answer here is to “continue to live our lives as we normally do”. Anything else means that “the terrorists will already have won”.
The problem is that if we need to be told that, to be told what’s right and what’s wrong, the terrorists have truly already won. Anything I write here is admitting that the attacks have affected us. There’s no point in denying it. A president of one of the world’s most powerful nations brought it to war against two states under varying degrees of correct excuses and is eyeing two, maybe three other states. Pretending to have no idea what you’re talking about but we’re doing everything in our power to kill the bastards doesn’t fly. We can stop belittling ourselves, but that doesn’t just mean “stop acting as if planes will fly into skyscrapers from now on”.
Three years ago today, the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anna Lindh, was pronounced dead as a result of being stabbed in the stomach the day before in the middle of a warehouse, days before a referendum asking if Sweden should adopt the Euro. The assassin, Mijailo Mijailović was in jail within 15 months. He was mentally ill, although not mentally ill enough at the time of the murder to be sentenced to psychological care instead of lifetime imprisonment.
There are problems in the world. Without necessarily writing them off as the correct courses of action, it’s clear that they are functions of the current situation, everything that has happened up until then. The situation before September 11th, 2001 prompted the attacks. The situation before September 11th, 2003 prompted the murder. You could analyze these situations, what led up to them and their aftermath for ages. You could stick people in jail or bomb their country and somehow think that now, everything’s fine or that we’ve at least avenged the fuckers. The only thing I think we can all agree on is that not changing is not the answer, or that stopping to reflect on everything is not going to be a substitute for making better choices in the future.
An eye for an eye will only make the world go blind.
