I’ve seen various friends on Facebook today discussing their feelings about 9/11/2001 and some of their experiences that day. Some were close to Ground Zero; others had friends who were murdered; others, like me, were a few thousand miles away and knew only people who knew people who were murdered.
It’s hard to forget the sheer horror of that day. I made the mistake of watching the second plane go into the other World Trade Center building every time it was shown on TV—and, of course, that was multiple times. As a result, for the next few nights, I woke up out of awful nightmares in which I was on one of the hijacked airplanes.
I think the most horrible thing for me was watching people jump out of buildings to a certain death: their fear of being burned alive must have been overwhelming.
It’s important not to forget the horror of 9/11. It’s as important, and probably more important, to learn from it. If we in America can feel the horror of our fellow citizens (and, by the way, especially in New York, non-U.S. citizens) being murdered, even though the vast majority of them were strangers, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of people in other countries who are just as innocent but who are killed by governments. Sometimes those governments are their own; sometimes those governments are foreign governments and, at least occasionally, the U.S. government.
I think back to U.S. Army General Curtis Lemay and his fire-bombing of dozens of Japanese cities that were not primarily military targets during World War II. Or, even earlier, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his bombing raid in April 1942 on Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya. The vast majority of people killed by those bombing raids were innocent civilians.
What I would like, as I noted above, is for Americans to learn from 9/11. It was a great teaching moment, and the chance was pretty much lost. But there’s no reason that we can’t still learn from it.
READER COMMENTS
Jonathan Goff
Sep 12 2018 at 12:25am
David,
I was in the Philippines, half-way through a mission for my church when 9/11 happened. I think I was fortunate to say that I never got to see the airplanes crash into the Trade Centers. I came home to a different country, with only some of the differences being for the better, unfortunately. Human nature struggles to keep a clear head when exposed to horrible tragedies like that. It’s been sad to think of all the evil and pain that’s been spawned by the events of 9/11. I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever make it back to some sense of sanity.
~Jon
David Seltzer
Sep 12 2018 at 6:23pm
The great Rabbi Hillel’s comment to the pagan, “That which is dispicable to you, do not do to others.” It seems not only are despots and military adventurism killing us, it is also fractal. The same at all scales. The Silver Rule, as it were, is ignored by The thought police, social media critics of all stripes and bureaucrats separated from the consequences of their actions. Enough of this screed, but you get the idea. A small band of social mutants want to rule us with force or threats of force. Thucydides’s deep insight, “Human nature being what it is.”
V L Elliott
Sep 12 2018 at 7:37pm
Yes, let us learn and remember but let us learn the complete lessons. The “mom and pop” shops in Tokyo on which the Imperial Japanese Government was having to depend for parts for its air force — were the workers in them or those who otherwise supported those workers “innocent”? Maybe but they were a part of the system that had, as at least a part of its purpose, the killing of American and Allied service personnel, a process the Imperial Japanese Government had begun in 1941. I suggest that precision in our terminology is a part of those lessons we need to learn especially in a world in which the truly innocent too often become the targeted victims of those who use terrorism as a form of war because the terms themselves open the door to misjudgment. Surely there were “innocents” in Cambodia once peace broke out in the Spring of 1975 and in the Republic of Viet-Nam shortly thereafter and in the mountains of Laos and some became victims because we abandoned them in pursuit of peace. Some of the lessons to be learned from Kampuchea’s Killing Fields, Viet-Nam’s concentration camps and boat expulsions/exodus and the highlands of Laos as well as in the former Yugoslavia include the need for strength and a clear knowledge of the interest of the group. And most certainly we should remember in our lessons that someone needs to speak for the dead, which I believe may relate to your discussion. Yes, let’s learn the lessons Dr. Henderson and let’s work very, very hard to learn all of the entire lesson each time so that we do not weaken ourselves beyond prudence opening the door to future 9/11s nor do we operate in a bubble of unwarranted innocence of our own anymore than we operate without concern for the weak, the aged, the very young, some of whom some are our own. Reflection on our most basic principles might be helpful as might a widespread dose of humility, the latter reaching far beyond the borders and citizens of the United States of America.
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