Passenger plane hitting World Trade Center tower, NYC, Sept. 11, 2001           

                    (credit: https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/09/10/remembering-                                                    the-september-11th-terrorist-attacks/) 

                                    (credit: David Handschuh, NY Daily News) 

                                             (further citation above) 

                                   9/11: Personal Reflections

I have a number of American friends, some physically in my life off and on, and some online friends whose thoughts I enjoy reading. I identify deeply with the basic premises of America: freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of movement, worship, commerce and markets, and so on. The rejection of titles, kings, and aristocracies. America, this one’s for you.

I didn’t hear about the 9/11 attacks until about 7 a.m. Pacific Time on this day in the calendar twenty three years ago. I was rushed that morning, I had so much to do when I got to school, much of it before our scheduled start time for classes. (No real classes were going to happen.) I didn’t turn on the tv in my home at all.

When I tuned in to my car radio on the way to work, the South Tower had just collapsed. The CBC local radio had switched to CBC’s reporter in New York, who was orally agog. A bad metaphor, but readers know what I mean. The second tower went down while I was trying to do prep work for classes and watching t.v. monitors, which in our new school were all over the building.

I bumped into my old friend and colleague, Jim Holtz, as I was coming out of the photocopying room just a minute before the North Tower’s collapse. Subtle irony. Jim was a draft dodger from Illinois who had come to Canada in 1968 to shun the terrible killing in Viet Nam. We walked upstairs together.

Obviously, he still had a lot of family and friends back in the U.S., though many of them had not talked to him since he’d left for Canada, and, as it turned out, would never talk to him again. He died of cancer in 2017. Best of my colleagues and a gentleman and a scholar in every way. I miss him now, as I write these lines.

Anyway, he was getting misty as we walked and kept glancing at screens. When the North Tower went down – all shown up close and intensely personal, I wept, “What, so now a bunch of innocents have to die for the sins of some politicians in a government most of them don’t even like!” (Yes, I do talk that way.) Jim didn’t weep, but his eyes were moist, and he muttered something like, “Apparently so.” Only that.  

Let me add, my American friends, that a hundred plus Canadians were working in the twin towers that day at that time, and twenty four of them died there. We did feel your pain and still do.

A week later, NYC had a service open to the families and friends of all who had died there. I remember one Canadian woman who went down for that service being interviewed afterward, again by the CBC. She had held onto an American woman who knew she was Canadian, and who had cried to her in anguish, “Why do they hate us so much?!!”

This was in the middle of the worst grief of both of their lives. I think one had lost a husband, the other a son. We have to keep the mitigating factors in mind.

And let’s also keep in mind that over 33,000 people from 230 commercial planes were immediately grounded in Canada. The radio orders were to clear the skies and across that huge space – mid-Atlantic to mid-Pacific and north and south for similar distances, the clearing of the skies by U.S. and Canadian Air Forces was done in about 40 minutes.

6,700 people had to land in Gander, Nfld. alone, a town which existed to service trans-Atlantic flights with fuel and provisions. There were under 10,000 people normally living in Gander, but between homes, schools, churches, etc., the locals took them all in, gave them showers, meals, and beds, and embraced them in their anguish. For about a week. (“Come From Away” is a true story.) Like Ambassador Taylor had done in Tehran with the Americans who had eluded capture when so-called “students” there had seized the U.S. embassy in 1979.

Were Canadians in those cases being warm? Human? Compassionate? Oh, for God’s sake, America! Let your friends love you. Yes, we disagree sometimes. But we live next door. We know you. Often better than you know yourselves. We still like you. A lot, actually.

But my point today is about that Canadian woman at the open service in NYC a week of so after 9/11 and her sharing her grief with her new American friend. Like most Canadians back then, she reacted to “Why do they hate us so much?” with a mixture of bemusement and incredulity. 

The tone of the CBC report on that small incident also implied the Canadian reaction. “Lady, where have you been? Do you know anything about the puppet regimes that America has been propping up in other countries all over since at least Teddy Roosevelt’s times. Saddam Hussein was a CIA boy until he wasn’t. Do you know of Mossadegh’s murder in Iran? The Shah was the CIA’s stooge. Trujillo closer to home? Duvalier? Marcos? Batista right off your coast? Mobutu? Diem?"

And on and on. Even the money that built Hitler’s state was largely from American banks, though, in fairness, not American governments.

But people in foreign lands conflate all Americans. In their view, “regimes is memes and banks, schmanks”. "You’re all in it together," they say.

That’s not the fault of any ordinary citizens going to work today in the U.S., but it does in a subtle way show us why America had to abandon the whole idea of isolationism and why it is simple survival to teach world awareness and history to your children. World leadership, involvement, and responsibility are on you now, like it or lump it. The world’s markets, governments, and cultures are intertwined, and growing more so as I write. You're the one remaining superpower. You can’t ignore the world or even any major part thereof or you’ll pay. Not fair. But real.

This writer needs to stop ranting. This writer needs to calm down.   

What am I trying to say today? Do a lot of people in a lot of places curse the very name “America”? Yes, and partly with sound reasons.

They too are kidding themselves, of course. American governments much of the time were just protecting their citizens. Local populations want American cash and expertise, government and private. And companies especially are not there to watch their investments shrink. They look to whoever locally can bring order out of the chaos, and to be clear, chaos often is what they find. So back a local strong man and get on with mining or logging or whatever. Politics are not our business, say the corporate boards. They are wrong.  

And that’s the heart of the matter. You have to pay attention to the justices and injustices done in your name, my American friends. 

Or maybe, more fairly, I should say, “all my friends in the West”. We like to think we’re the grown ups in this global playground. And to a high degree, we are. Or at least, we should be. We have the material means to make a difference. 

If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to start acting that way. Adult. Calm. Balanced. Fair. Responsible. Looking to treat our brothers and sisters everywhere like our brothers and sisters everywhere. Not like means to a profit. 

The world has an excess of profit and of stuff. Meaningless junk. Time to turn to each other.

Thoughts on 9/11.

On the other side of some sober thoughts, have a sober day. As you should. And in fairness, as should all of us here in the West.   

                       (Woman covered in dust minutes after first tower collapsed)

                                                        (citation as above) 

         US Secret Service agent carrying woman from the site

(credit: citation as above) 

                                         I have not winced, nor cried aloud       

                                             Kathleen Quinlan 

                                  (actress who played Deb in movie of 

                               "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden") 

                                           (credit: Wikipedia) 

                        

Here’s a post that gets its point from a work of literature. Art is safer to talk about than real life. After all, a novel is fiction, right?

One of the great novels of the last century is called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”. It is about a period during the life of a teenaged girl named “Deb”, who suffers a serious mental illness and ends up in an asylum for nearly three years. She does get better, due partly to her family’s support, but even more to some brilliant and compassionate work by her psychiatrist whose name is "Dr. Hannah Fried". 

It’s a brilliant novel and deserves to be rated as one of the best ten or so American novels ever written. Written by a woman about a woman being healed by a woman, with the love and support of her mom, who’s also – how gratifying! – a woman. Which is all beside the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, period, regardless of which gender, class, or race it focuses on. Universal, which seems to be rated of little importance these days. But all drivel aside, my post today focuses on one scene from that novel.

Deb’s story happens during World War Two. A lot of the men are far away fighting the Japanese and the Germans, which means that jobs are hard to fill. Some of the staff in Deb’s hospital are very caring and professional, but some definitely are not. In better times, they would not even have been there. They hate the job and hate the insane, who can be pretty trying at times, which is only what one would expect.

In one scene in the novel, the strongest woman on Deb’s ward, who has in the past done serious, physical injury to other patients and to staff, has been tied down on a gurney in a wet sheet pack, a measure which was used to calm violent patients. The point is that Helene, the patient in question, is helpless, and she is in a separate room off the main hallway of the ward. Almost soundproof. 3 a.m. There are two patients in there in wet sheet packs on this night, the other being Deb.

A seriously neurotic attendant named ‘Ellis’ is on duty for midnight shift. He has come in to check their pulses to see whether they have calmed down enough to be allowed to go to sleep in their beds. He is indifferent to Deb, but he despises Helene. It soon shows. When he turns her head to get easier access to her carotid pulse, he emphasizes his power over Helene with some unnecessary roughness. She is not to be toyed with, even strapped down helpless. She curses at him. He slaps her. She spits at him. He slaps her again.

Slap. Spit. Slap. Spit. Fist.

As Deb watches, helpless, humiliated, ashamed, he punches Helene ten or a dozen times hard, while she, of course, can’t do anything but spit at him. She spits blood, then blood and chips of teeth. She gives up when she is almost beaten unconscious. He takes her pulse, picks up his clipboard, writes something, and leaves.

The scene is ugly and infuriating. Even more for Deb, it is humiliating. She must witness this ugliness and see Helene broken by violence at the hands of a dysfunctional male who never should have been in such a position of power. She feels secretly ashamed that she didn’t scream, which was, of course, because she was scared. Helene would not cry out because of her own “hard girl” code. So in the end, what gets done about the matter is nothing.

My point today, by a bit of a lateral leap, is that we are witnessing in these times, the social parallel of Helene’s suffering. People – or we should say, whole peoples, whole tribes – in some dire circumstances, become just as tough, just as determined as Helene to endure no matter what. Right into the grave.

The Palestinians have become that. They have suffered for seventy years. Robbed, beaten, humiliated, starved, killed. Abandoned even by other Arab states. They didn’t get the kind of despairing, numb, cynical, and hard they are now in a decade or even a generation. It took years and years. But they’re there now.

The Israelis could kill ninety nine percent of the people in Gaza and the West Bank. The remaining one percent – under fifty thousand – would keep spitting blood and chips of teeth. From all over the earth.  

Deb got better. A good doctor. A supportive family, both due, at least in part, to their having money. She went back to the world.

Did Helene ever get better? The book does not say. She might have. Or she might have died there. She just gets dropped out of the story.

Her character no longer shapes or informs the narrative.

But Deb’s story is all fiction anyway. Who cares?  

                                     Gaza: digging for bodies

                         (credit: Associate Press website: Nov. 17, 2023) 

               (https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-buried-                           rubble-airstrikes-89c0e8d0934d573d94d2fbfeba44d933)

                                   Do You Like This Stuff?

Today, I’m offering a post that is not part of the piece I’m currently working on. A small departure. I feel driven to air some thoughts on the mess in the Middle East that’s flaring out of control now in 2024. Again.

I have thought for many years that one indicator of when I am getting closer to the truth on a subject is seen when I’m infuriating parties on every side. In short, too often, I know I’m getting closer to the truth the more I piss people off.

But damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. Truth doesn’t need the approval of anyone, no matter how important they seem in the “corrupted currents of this world [where] Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice”. (Hamlet)

What you’re saying is making people mad? Good!

So?

What have Bettin’ Yahoo and his ilk demonstrated over the last few months? That fanaticism leads to the most painful of ironies: you become the thing you thought, at the outset, that you hated. He has made Israel into a genocidal state. There isn’t one rationalization that he and his cabinet have given for their actions in Gaza over the past 11 months that hasn’t been used many times before, including by the Nazis. He has become the monster that he said he set out to destroy.

To preserve their culture, the people in Gaza have died in numbers at least thirty times those of the Israelis just in the last year. And finally, those Gazans are showing signs of collapsing? Hah! Not one bit. If anything, their resolve is hardening. Yahoo is learning he can’t “make Israel secure” by inflicting pain. No one can. In fact, the more suffering his troops heap onto the people of Gaza, the more determined the people of Gaza become.

To Israelis, that patch of dirt is land promised to them by Yahweh in the Torah in – what they see as – the beginning of time. To Palestinians, that land has been theirs for just as long. They are the descendants of the Philistines of the Bible.

Archeology says they’re both wrong. There were other tribes on that land before both Israelis and Palestinians. Which matters to – apparently – no one.

The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Gita – all the “holy” texts – are not legal documents. But to the fanatics of a hundred faiths, “man’s law” is irrelevant. Each has its book and its fanatics. Its "law". 

Let’s review a few more of the arguments.

Balfour promised that land to the early Zionists of modern times in 1917. Answer: The land was not his or his country’s to promise.

The Jews of Europe were the victims of the worst crime in history: the Holocaust. The world owed the Jews a land of their own. Answer: If we even entertain that possibility, we immediately must concede that those same Jews, mostly of Europe, have far more right to a piece of central Europe than they do to Palestine. The Germans and Poles were the nations that most miserably failed the Jews in every moral sense. Maybe, what was East Germany should have become the Jewish Homeland.

Furthermore, the Palestinian people had zero to do with the Holocaust. In fact, every recognized nation of those World War Two times was far guiltier in the matter of the Holocaust than the Palestinians, including all the free nations of the West.

The Jews were a people without a land who found a land without a people? Utterly false. There were people already there. Thousands of them. Yes, they lived in a technology well behind that of the West. No, that did not give anyone in the West or anywhere else the right to say they could be evicted from homes and lands their families had occupied for centuries.

The first people in modern times who called themselves ‘Israelis’ fought for and won that land against massive odds at the founding of Israel. So what? That ethic would endorse Nazism. Violence makes you right, say the Nazis. Winners write the history texts. Yes, they often do, but no, that does not make them right. Genghis Khan was a scary guy. His conquests still awe us. But no one wants him back. He became a monster. Like Hitler.

On the other other hand, (in logic, we have a lot of hands), the early Israelis did want to live together with their Arab neighbors and get along. It was Arabs who said “No deal. Get out!”

The Jews truly had suffered beyond any people ever during the Holocaust. They have a moral right to a homeland. If as a people they have resolved to trust no nation to look after them ever again, who can blame them? Six million - probably a low estimate - dead. Never again. 

I could go on, but the point is that all this is explainable by Social Science and none of it has to be this way.

Every tribe, not just Jews and Arabs, has its own culture. Every culture teaches its young when they are most impressionable that their way of life is the one truly human way. Almost always as well, the programming tells them that the divine power that their people have always believed in is real and has endorsed one way of life above all others.

I say such programming is all lies.

What the universe favors over the long generations and centuries is pluralism. A lot of different kinds of people, different in gender choices, creeds, skin tones, cheekbones, abilities, disabilities, and so on. A social ecosystem in which human rights protecting every minority and every individual are enforced by a democratic rule of law.

As long as you don’t try to force your way of life onto anyone else, you’re okay by me.

Unfortunately, there are a lot more tribes than just the Israelis and the Arabs who have the way of life and who are patiently, so patiently, waiting for the rest of the human species to see the light.

(We say we are God’s chosen people because we are. Why can’t you get that?)

The Jews, much of the West, in fact is actually saying, in simple modern terms, to the Arabs, “Get over it.”

The Arabs, in fact much of the Developing World, are actually saying, in simple modern terms, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

Oh, the patience of them all! The righteous anger!

But if Sociology is telling us that every tribe thinks its way of life is normal, natural, human, and right, does Sociology say that our warring and our eventually annihilating our species is an inevitability? Not quite.

Send your kids, all of them, to well-funded, well run, quality public schools in which no one faith group dictates what every child will study. The curriculum must be secular; a separation of church and state, for the schools are an arm of the state, which should be faith neutral.

If the first wave of modern Israeli education had put all the kids on that dirt into such schools, quietly endorsed science, not German science, art, not European art, history, not Islamic history, music, not Jewish music, and so on – if parents then had had the will and the vision to say ‘We shall raise citizens of the world, not good little Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus … or any others of the sects that put their holy books’ authority above the human rights of every citizen, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

Furthermore, as long as we allow schools in which such ‘higher authorities’ are being endorsed and taught, the suffering we’re seeing now will go on.

So I’ll ask again: if you want your kids to go to schools that endorse and teach some holy texts of some ancient tribe over science, world literature, and history, then do you like this stuff? Screaming kids, screaming parents, ripped limbs, shattered bones, and slumped dead bodies being dug out of rubble? Do you like this stuff?

If you choose any form of religious schooling for your children, this is what you ultimately are choosing. In the actions that speak so much louder than words, you are endorsing endless conflict. Maybe, the end of our species in not too long from now.

Do you like this stuff? 

          Elementary school in Meah She'arim, Israel    March 27, 2012 

                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

               Palestinian school in Fallujah, Iraq (March 20, 2005) 

                              (credit: Wikimedia Commons)