Socio-Political Rants.
I used to be not afraid of much, maybe ghosts and dead bodies, people eating worms and gross things. I would sling a backpack on my back and go traveling all by myself without speaking a word of the local language. I would drive in bad neighborhoods in LA to go to parties and listen to house music. I slept on planes, rode in fast cars, partied for a few days straight with people I probably shouldn’t have been even hanging with. When I had a gun pointed at me at 19 the only thing I could really say was, "Why would someone have a gun at his place?"
I just had no fear and was an unrequited thrill chaser.
That all changed after September 11th.
I walked into my hotel room in a strange city and watched two buildings go down.
I had never heard of Al Queda, I never knew anything about the Middle East. I was an ignorant person of the tensions of that part of the world. I never even knew there was a country called Afghanistan.
But what I did know was that the man I wanted to be with and my best friend was in the city and I didn’t know if either of them were alive anymore.
I spent that night talking to New York, watching the footage over and over again while my best friend watched the smoldering left over rubble burn from her windows. We waited to see if California was going to be hit. The news said there were some planes still unaccounted for. We waited in silence. We both felt somewhat placated that no one we knew lived near the golden gate bridge. Both our fathers worked in the high rises of down town LA. At least our college town of Santa Cruz would not be affected. Who was going to bomb a few hippies and a campus in the forest? But we cried. We didn’t want to see California burn.
At 4am CNN announced all planes were grounded, and we felt safe enough to sleep.
She said she hoped I could fly home. I told her so too.
Neither of us knew Singapore and Hong Kong didn’t have anything to do with the tensions that created this. We only knew planes flew into tall buildings and I had a lot of them around me everywhere.
A few days later I had to get back on a plane and i started laughing hysterically before my boss and I got on. I stared at him and said, "If I had to die, i know who would be the people who bring this plane down." I said, looking at the four young Muslim looking men. I landed to see all American planes grounded in an air field near the flight path and silhouettes of blue berets holding machine guns.
But I was home.
In the night I would wake up in cold sweats sometimes screaming when I heard a plane
above and open the curtains to see if any of the tall buildings I saw
outside my window will be obliterated. Sometimes I would just hide waiting for the inevitable boom. It never came.
I finally knew how easy it was to walk out of the house and get killed by the unimaginable.
So for a while I didn’t.
That seems so long ago.
I had probably forgotten that was me, and that was how I felt. I don’t think about September 11th and sometimes when I am reminded, I feel okay.
But tonight I watched the news. They said that the nuclear plant in Sydney could have been attacked. My mom and my step dad live there. My whole family on my moms side live there. I heard the news and walked into the bathroom and tried not to throw up. I keep telling myself that it was ended. This wasn’t going to happen. The police did their jobs. They will now step up security, and even if they didn’t, there was a big chance these men couldn’t have pulled it off anyway.
But I feel sick and worried. I have closed my curtains. I can hear every airplane overhead. Since I moved I wasn’t even aware I still lived under a flight path. Tomorrow when the sun comes back up I will go back to living my life as best I can. I will finish up the work to do with Rockit, I will start working on a new installation. I will do my dishes. I won’t think about how radioactive atoms could have floated over a city with the extended population of 12 million. A place I will eventually call home.
Those fanatics are so stupid. They are afforded more freedom to live, to practice their religion, more economic possibilities, better education, better health care, better infrastructure in Australia than they ever would have been if they were "home." Yet they are not grateful, they do not care, they wanted to kill innocent people and put fear in other’s lives for the sake of "Jihad."
They will kill their children, their wives, their friends by default for the sake of going to heaven.
Some say, if you give people money, give them television, give them opportunities then they will open their minds. It’s so proven it’s not the case. Those people have all those things but they rather destroy it all.
Extremists are so frightening, they have no logic, no reason only ideology.
I don’t know why we can’t move away from all that in the twenty first century.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
“Some say, if you give people money, give them television, give them opportunities then they will open their minds. It’s so proven it’s not the case. Those people have all those things but they rather destroy it all.”
That’s a spectacularly naive world view for someone who claims to be pro-democracy. Presumably being “given” a TV is an acceptable exchange for imperialism. Or maybe Bush is doing the right thing by bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East? Those “muslim-looking” types just don’t know what’s good for them.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t expect to oppress millions of people without creating a few dozen fanatics. Of course, it’s all good news for Western (and Australian)leaders, because it allows them to introduce more Orwellian legislation and avoid their international human rights obligations.
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I think there something b/w the lines that you missed. She’s not saying anything about Bush bringing freedom and democracy to the middle east.
And muslim fanatics far predate Bush’s rise to power. I think her point is dismay and fear over the fact that despite a modernizing world parochial forces may mass to kill and maim innocent persons in the name of a distorted ideology. Fear of people who will kill and destroy in order to halt the march of progress.
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The history of Western oppression in the Middle East goes back several centuries before Bush. You have to look at these things holistically, not just in the context of 9/11 or 7/7 or Afghanistan or Iraq.
With regard to killing innocents in the name of ideologies (distorted or not), the bodycount is clearly in favour of the West as far as the Middle East goes.
Progress is exactly what the West does not want to see in the region. If there were free and fair elections in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, do you really think the pro-West royal families would retain power? Would you feel comfortable with the prospect of President Bin Laden?
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Well, the world was quite comfortable with the idea of president Mullah Omar before…
Anyway, the more I look back at it, it seems more like 9/11 was a relatively small scale, isolated incident that was made much more out of than it was. The chances of being killed by a terrorist are still many times smaller than of getting killed crossing the street or any other mundane daily act.
I think much of it has to do with the state of the media. Especially 24 hour newsstations seem to not bring more news, but the same news over and over again. And it’s usually small scale human interest stories. In the last week my local 24h news station (Sky) has been going on about a boy killed by racists (first half of the week) and two policewomen getting shot (end of the week). Several times an hour. And at the next hour the whole cycle all over again. Just as a test I googled a typical news story that would be glossed over by such a station (hunger in Africa) and voila: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4699643.stm. Never noticed it. Just look at the link at the bottom of that page.
Don’t let the media scare you. Terrorism worldwide is down. Support for Bin Laden and his cause is low and falling. There are much more important issues in this world. Whether it’s the pressure to get more viewers or some agenda is a different argument, but needless to say journalism right now is not what it should be.
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True. I’d be much more worried about what governments will justify with the terrorism “threat”. 90 days imprisonment without charge is too harsh? Ok, we’ll “compromise” – how about 28 days, that’s only a third, not too bad is it?
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Yan,
I know how you feel. In my case, though, I came to the shocking realization of modern society’s vulnerability during high school. I’m not sure why it happened, but I think it had something to do with the fact that even then I was fascinated by armed conflict and politics. That realization (it was a slow process) made it hard for me to get along with everyone. Either most of the other kids were all correct that things in 90s America were perfect and I was just the weird kid, or I was correct that things were ready to jump off the rails, and everyone else was in a state of denial. I remember that I would get freaked out. The more I learned about how vulnerable modern society was, the more I wanted to figure out how to deal with it on a personal level, or on a wider societal level. As it was I had a hard time getting along with other kids, and it sort of drew me away from people even more.
My freshman year at Cal, I ended up writing a paper about the Vietnam War. Cal had an amazing library and I was able to track down everything from the mass market general histories to privately published memoirs. At the end of writing that paper I looked around at modern America and realized that the institutions which were unable to adapt and change the disastrous strategy in Indochina still existed, basically unchanged. I concluded that one day the United States would face another armed conflict, and the institutions that failed during the late 60s would fail again. Still, in the heady days of the late 90s, I managed to forget about these things. Part of me felt that everyone else was right, and I was being overly pessimistic.
When the first plane hit the towers, I thought it must have been an accident. But, when (on CNN International) I watched the second plane hit, I knew it was terrorists, and I knew it was bin Laden and Al Qaeda. September 11th was a horrible day for me not only because of the death toll, but because it confirmed my suspicions about modern life. The ensuing fiasco of the Iraq War has only strengthened my views.
The events of Sept. 11th and the ensuing consequences cut short a very happy time in my life. Yet, something good came out of that day too, which was that I reluctantly learned to trust the validity of my own observations about the world around us.
Ironically, the very technologies that we use to oppose the Chinese government are the technologies which terrorists can use to organize suicide bombers. The web, encryption, blogs, SMS, cell phones, powerful laptops, GPS and the internet empower individuals, without discrimination. As much as the new information technologies turbo-charge our social lives, enable new art forms and empower the struggle for a democratic HK, they also empower Islamist killers, human traffickers and high-finance con men.
As an aside, what is most frightening to me is not that religiously motivated insurgents act without reason. What is most frightening to me is that the politico-religious ideologies driving insurgency are logically consistent and coherent on their own terms. The thinkers and strategists driving these movements have the ability to make long term plans. That applies not only to radical Islamists, but to the Christianist and nationalist right (think Pat Robertson) in America as well.
At the close of the Cold War, the United States and the industrialized First World were very fortunate to enjoy when it seemed as if we had tamed the forces of random mass murder. The dark days of hair trigger nuclear annihilation were behind us and the future looked like a never-ending evolution of prosperity. People in the Third World were never so lucky, facing down the ravages of genocide, HIV, starvation and totalitarian dictatorship, sometimes simultaneously.
In the end I have learned to deal with the reality that I, my friends or my family might be killed at any moment by forces far beyond my control. I have learned to deal with it by participating in things that offer a positive alternative to totalitarian ideology. It’s why I continue to participate in conversations here at Glutter, why I blog, and why I am working on a web-based project to aid non-violent, grassroots political movements.
We do the best we can with what we have.
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