I am writing this not as an argument, a judgment, or to pontificate my political prejudices. I am writing this because it is how I feel about where we stand nearing the anniversary of a day that could have taught us so many lessons that we refused to learn.
** The video below is the most affecting 9/11 song I know. The instrumental at 4 minutes takes me back to how I felt that day watching innocent people killed in the name of hatred. **
I
decided to spend most of my Labor Day alone reflecting on my last 10 years
since the impending anniversary of 9/11.
Everyone remembers where they were that day, who they were with, and who
they called on the phone. If you dig
deep enough, you can also find what they were going to do and had to forego
because they couldn’t be torn away from the television screen. And with enough discussion you can almost
always see glassy eyes begin to move from you into the distance and the
discussion moves from a two-way conversation into a recounting of a specific
experience and a retelling of the dread and shock that we invariably all felt
together but each of us felt was specifically targeting at us alone. I’ve rarely been surrounded by so many and
felt as alone as I did that day.
In
the 10 years since 9/11, our country has experienced more civil strife than it
has since the Civil War. We have since
lost touch with who we are, what inspires us to come together against a common
foe, and what enabled a small group of people to inhabit a strange land and turn
it into the most influential society since ancient Rome.
I
was born in 1973 and was able to experience at least the tail end of the Cold
War. What I remembered very distinctly was
the feeling that we can quarrel among ourselves all day; but when someone
from the outside would pose a threat, we could quickly mobilize as one unit,
wave our Stars and Stripes, and know that when we are at our best, there is no
enemy that cannot be beaten. We were a
family – 240 million strong and the whole world knew it.
Unfortunately,
we have become a nation more and more divided both socially and
politically. It has become more
important to be right than to be effective and we have lost the cohesiveness
that the rest of the world admired. The
desire to come to a common ground has been replaced with the need to push
agendas down throats so hard that it chokes the passageways that allow for
two-way debate. Our two-party system has
become so hard-lined that it is no longer about small differences in ideals,
but is now thought of as good versus evil.
Our ability to think for ourselves has been hampered by a need to belong
specifically to one party or another and follow its agenda to the bitter
end. There aren’t a ton of pro-choice
Republicans out there and I haven’t found many pro-life Democrats. You also won’t find a Republican screaming
from the rooftops about the need for gun control and no Democrat is going to
proudly wave his NRA card on the Capital steps.
The
harm in this hard-lining is that we are swearing allegiance to things simply to
belong. We want to belong out of fear of
losing the camaraderie of “A” side, “ANY” side.
Belonging as Americans has been replaced with belonging as a member of a
political party. If you were in the
military and consider yourself a devout Christian, you HAVE to be a Republican
and you HAVE to believe in the ideology across the board. If you want to see better fuel efficiency in
cars, to legalize marijuana, and eat organic foods, you HAVE to be a Democrat
and you HAVE to follow the entire platform.
This
has and will continue to make us make decisions for the wrong reason. Here is a perfect example: In a recent online article in War Room, a
political news and commentary blog , written by Matt Stoller cites that
President “Obama has ruined the Democratic Party.” His article states in part:
“Of
course, there are many rationalizations for Obama to remain the nominee. He’s faced difficult opposition. He’s passed major legislation. His presidency is historic. The economy is hard to resuscitate. But all such rationalizations evade the
party’s responsibilities to actually choose the nominee best suited to win
votes. If Obama looks unlikely to get
enough votes to win, he should not get the nomination.
It
would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party
orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come
precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic party voters.”
The
question then would have to be asked:
Should our President begin making decisions solely for the purpose of
gaining votes for the upcoming election?
If so, and he should just become a hand-puppet for the ideal, then we
haven’t hired a man. We may as well have
built a computer that spits out answers along party lines. Do we really want that? I myself do not. What if Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, or
even Harry Truman had not listened to their own hearts?
I
feel we elected a very intelligent man and put him in a very difficult
situation. And based on the swiftness in
which Bill Clinton pulled us out of a bad economy, we expected Obama to be able
to do the same. And perhaps if Obama
were better politician, he could have done a little better. Instead he is roundly criticized for not
being a hard-liner, for considering all sides, and for allowing others to
present an argument instead of just shutting them down in some sith-like
manner. And no matter what decision he
makes, he will be wrong. Republicans will not respect him because he is not hard enough and Democrats will criticize him for not sticking to their agenda.
Maybe
self-reflection has been lost and has given way to the ease of black and white. And maybe we've forgotten that you can learn more from someone who does not share the same views as you do than someone who has exactly the same views as you do.
A
great lesson that I learned many years ago is that the best way to learn from
an experience is not to consider the what, where, when, or how, but the “why.” Sometimes we get so caught up on the facts of
what happened without relying enough on the motives behind the actions. Maybe if we looked closer at the motives of
an action and considered without judgment the paradigm of the person who
committed those actions, we can better understand our strife, from wherever it
may come. Maybe even if we looked at not
only our motives, but the motives of our antagonists, we can grow from the
experience. If we tried to ask the question "why" more often and attempted to understand others, we could not only see more in them but more in ourselves.
The
events of 9/11 were the result of a group of people taking a hard-line approach. Why did they do it? Because they felt they were the good guys and
we were the bad guys. We responded with
a war that held the same ideals. That
war split the country as sides, those who wanted and those who didn’t want the
war, stuck to a hard-line, villainizing the other side. If you didn’t want the war, you were not
patriotic and you didn’t “support the troops.”
If you wanted the war, you were a violent oil profiteer
sympathizer. There was no middle ground
and that line is growing stronger every day as our current administration is
attacked without remorse as defense to the previous administration’s
failures.
Maybe we can’t negotiate with terrorists. But we can negotiate with each other and we
can see the bigger picture of keeping the sanctity of this great Nation
preserved. We can see that in the
timeline of our country’s being, we have seen better times, but we have seen
worse times. What brought us out of
those worse times was the notion that no one person is bigger than the needs of
the citizens of the United States. We
struggled to become independent; we struggled again to preserve it; we followed
that with civil war; we followed that by a great depression; we struggled with
the possible end of the world against the soviets; then we came to a boil for
civil rights. These were all struggles
that could have brought a lesser nation down.
But these eras did not bring us down – they helped us to evolve.
We have beaten every challenge that has faced us. It would be a great shame to bring this
country down with internal greed, arbitrary hatred, and arrogance.
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