Aided by Gemini AI
To start out, I want to make it perfectly clear that I sympathize deeply with the American people for their losses in the Twin Towers disaster. In the first place, the loss of life was tragic. If only for that reason, the event will go down in American legend, with tales of the losses and the heroism of the rescuers taking their rightful places in the country’s lore.
But one way of dealing with any tragedy is to look for positive elements in it, and the best way to find a plus side is to ask, “What have we learned from this?”
The First Lesson
What made this event even more powerful was that it was the first time foreign soldiers had set foot in the continental United States since the Battle of Ambos Nogales in 1918. Which no one has ever heard of (they were Mexican).
But the American public woke up one day in 2001 to find that one of the wars their leaders had been waging for the past century on other people’s lands had finally come home to their own soil. And if this were a fairy story, the Americans would learn what it feels like to have war shatter your life. In a rush of empathy, they would tell their leaders to quit all this imperialistic posturing and get the United Nations to fulfill its mandate for world peace.
The Worst Lesson
But while many of their people thought that way, their leaders and the commercial interests that paid their election costs took a different approach.
Up until that point, the powerful nations of the world had paid lip service to the concept of the sanctity of national boundaries. CIA international actions at least pretended to be secret. Now, in the hallowed schoolyard bully tradition of “He started it,” American troops began to expand their overt operations: Granada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice) Somalia, Haiti, Libya and a host of other “interventions” harder to classify.
And the question we have to ask ourselves is whether the victims of the World Trade Attack were merely collateral damage in a continuing imperialistic campaign by the American Empire. Recent threats against NATO allies Canada and Denmark make you wonder.
Donald Trump at least had the moxie to leave the citizens to mourn in peace while he took his warmongering rhetoric to the Pentagon, where his accusations of evil were less likely to provoke reaction with an election coming up.
And if I were an American, I’d watch a would-be dictator cozying up to the military, and a cold shiver would go down my spine. When assigning accusations of “evil,” one of my first criteria would involve “greed.”
The Bottom Line
November 11 started out as a day of memory for the dead, but its purpose has slowly morphed into a call for peace. Wouldn’t it be nice if September 11 could take on a similar objective?