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July 27, 2004
The Road Not Taken
During the prime-time hour of the first day of the Democratic Convention, Haleema Salie talked with a quivering, accented English about her daughter, son-in-law, and unborn grandchild who were on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11 and how, on that day, we seemed resolved to be a better people; she was followed by 16-year-old violinist Gabe Lefkowitz’s beautiful, unpretentious rendition of "Amazing Grace," the ultimate Christian song of redemption written by a slave-trader who became an abolitionist following a miraculous survival in a treacherous storm.
It made me ache for the road not taken after 9/11: a soul-searching nation, an honest dialogue about our place in the world, a repudiation of all that is revealed as inconsequential by tragedy... If only this stuff occurred to the Democrats when not scripting long televised commercials paid by large corporations and public funds.
Still, it would have been moving even if it were an ad for Halliburton.
Posted by zeynep at July 27, 2004 04:02 AM
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Comments
I worked for 31 years in a local (county-level) government agency as a social worker. I hate to even let this out of the bag--my actual occupation because there is so much prejudice involving my job among the general public. But I state this now just to illustrate that even though most of my co-workers were well-educated people who should have known better, they, too, were almost univerally duped by the 9-11 coverage on the mainstream media. I had to go around to my co-workers to the degree that I could and give them a brief history lesson regarding American Imperialism of which many of the younger, just out of grad-school social workers seemed totally unaware. I saw very little or practically no introspective analysis even among my well-educated co-workers as to why anyone else in the world--leaving alone for the moment exactly whom I may personally think is responsible for the crimes of 9-11--would want to "harm us." There seemed to be no recognition of the more than 125 years at the very least of imperial and colonial conquests carried out by our government in the names of all of the rest of us. Forget that one could easily make a good argument from the indigenous perspective that America has been about imperialism from day one, from 1492 on that fateful day when West Indies indigenous tribal members chose to help those strange men in the strange boats rather than letting them drown from their own ignorance of the land which they had just entered.
I guess my point here is that I, too, am appalled at the lack of national soul-searching that should have been a natural by-product of the crimes of 9-11. However, given the way in which this country was orginally formulated and created, and given the huge doses of genocide, slavery, white-supremacy, racism, zenophobia, misogyny, chauvanism, et al that are part of the American cultural psyche perhaps we should not be surprised by anything that has happened since 9-11.
Clearly though it was a missed opportunity to change the tragic direction in which American Society has always been headed. We all know intuitively that American Society is too corrupt and irresponsible to remain sustainable for very much longer without something giving big-time. 9-11 was a very sadly missed opportunity to turn things around. Was it our last opportunity must now be the question I suppose?
Sincerely,
Old & In The Way
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