I was looking back at what I had written on previous anniversaries of 9/11. 4 years ago I wrote on that day, but did not post it until the next morning. It was in reaction to a column written by Derrick Jackson. As I reread it this evening I found much of what I wrote still relevant, so I decided that I would repost it now, before the actual anniversary. I will not be offended if you choose to ignore it. I hope it speaks to at least some.
SIX YEARS after Sept. 11, America has yet to turn somber remembrance into sober reflection.
Yesterday, we rightfully condemned the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 of us and praised the heroes who lost lives saving lives.
Today is just another ordinary day of national and global gluttony.
Nothing has changed these parallel universes, not Sept. 11, not the fact that we are likely to lose our 4,000th soldier in Iraq by year's end, in a needless war that President Bush falsely tied to Sept. 11. Nothing has truly pricked America to check out its conscience. Bush to date has not asked for sacrifice and certainly none have been volunteered.
So begins a somber column by Derrick Jackson in today's Boston Globe entitled Has Sept. 11 changed us? Not much. In this diary I will examine Jackson's argument and offer a few reflections of my own.
Jackson offers a number of statistics which seem to reinforce the idea that Bush's post-September 11 suggestion that Americans go shopping may have actually have been listened to. Consider the following
- our global share of petroleum consumption has actually increased slightly, from 21 percent to 21.9 percent, according to federal statistics
- the average size of a new American house has grown by nearly 200 square feet since Bush took office,from 2,265 square feet in 2000 to 2,456 square feet in 2006
- obesity: 47 states at more than 20% obese, with MS over 30% and 14 more over 26% leading to an estimate national cost for obesity of between $69 billion and $117 billion a year
But Jackson cannot offer all the examples, not in one column. Think of the mad rushes to by Harry Potter or I-phones. I walk around our high school, which has a mix of socio-economic groups, and before school it is the rare students who does not have earphones in, and one can only imagine the expenses of the downloads.
Each day traveling to and from my job I cross the national capital district. The wounded an traumatized military at Walter Reed are a local story to us, and their is a C&W bar in College Park, about 5 miles from our campus, to which many go. These military men and women serve as a stark reminder of our unwillingness as a nation to fully pay the price for our military adventurism.
- They are volunteers, even if only for Guard units called up for tasks never imagined
- They are underequipped and often undertrained for the missions to which they are assigned
- Their rotations are extended because we lack sufficient manpower for the tasks we lace on them, we do not properly screen them for PTSD before sending them back into theater or releasing them to civilian life
- We provide insufficient resources for their post-service medical and psychological care
But our SUVS and our houses and our waistlines continue to grow.
We can afford tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires but we cannot afford care for our military.
We allow excessive profits for favored military contractors but we cannot care for the poor or New Orleans nor rebuild their part of the city after Katrina.
Energy companies can make an excessive profit but we lack the political will to insist on sufficient funding for a quality education for all of our children.
The profits of pharmaceutical companies soar in conjunction with the medically caused bankruptcies of our people, including those with medical coverage that is insufficient.
Jackson says it so much better than can I. He points out how we Americans seem to want to eat ourselves into an early grave. Some response to 9-11. There is so much more I might want to say, but his final two short paragraphs are more articulate than I could ever hope to be:
Big cars. Burgeoning houses. Bloated bellies. There is, of course, much more to America than this, especially our freedoms. But these are symbols that we take too much liberty with our prosperity.
Yesterday, the White House asked us to remember the losses in "the most barbaric attack in our nation's history." How long other countries will completely sympathize with our loss is a growing question. With each pound, each square foot, each SUV, we conduct our own attack on what we should share with the rest of the world.
If the only change after 9-11 is more of the same - gluttony, selfishness, arrogance - we should not be shocked at the reactions of people in other nations. We seem to insist on the right to our use of force to assure the so-called American way of over-consumption (which is a more appropriate labelling than a way of life).
The classical writer Juvenal gave us the expression panem et circenses: bread and circuses, the means by which the Roman elite offered such palliatives in lieu of addressing the real needs of the society. In our case, we are given the illusion of a material success actually not available to most Americans and this is use to distract us from the government's failure to provide our basic needs or to ensure our basic liberties, the liberties and freedoms that should be the core of the American way of life.
However we can no longer blame our government. We elect those people. If we do not insist on something different, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If by our economic choices we continue to insist upon the American way of consumption, it will become the American way of death - of each of us individually, and of the characteristics that made this once liberal democracy a beacon for people all over the world.
Jackson's column is yet another clarion call, one that unfortunately too many will neither hear or read, and among those few who encounter it still fewer will give it attention.
Today is September 11, 2007. Is there a possibility that each of us, by our individual actions, can make this other than just another ordinary day of national and global gluttony?
Crossing my fingers that we can, I offer my usual expression of hope:
Peace.