Jeff Jarvis reflects on three years after the twin towers fell:
But our stock-taking as a nation and as a civilized half of the world is troubling this year, for we are fighting with each other, not with our enemy.
And that enemy has only dug down to new depths of atrocity: from jets filled with innocents killing innocents, down to children strapped up as bombs, down to bombs in backpacks on trains, down to beheadings on video, down to schoolchildren captured and killed. They fall deeper and deeper into hell.
And we just yell at each other: left v. right, Kerry v. Bush, Swift v. Kerry, Moore v. Bush, France v. America, America v. France, Iraqi v. Iraqi, damned near everybody v. Israel…. We fight all the wrong fights and wrong enemies and meanwhile let our real enemies invent new evil and drag us down with them.
We’re all falling.
(Via Allison).
That is the trap. How can we protect what we value if we give it up? What is the point if we are not allowed to question or to debate? Who gets to decide who is civilized, who lives on the proper half of the planet and most importantly, who the “real enemy” is?
Dude, the real enemy is the guy shooting schoolchildren and taking down full skycrapers.
I am no absolutist, but some things are just plain true.
And I don’t know about Canada, but here in the US, we have been doing nothing but questioning and debating since 9/11/01. And if you don’t believe me, a person who has a oh-so-non-postmodernist idea that truth exists, believe the thousands of enraged protesters that recently descended upon NYC.
We don’t do much these days, in fact, except debate each other.
A few years back, a few guys in a plane dropped a bomb on a city. It took down whole sections of the city making it toxic and instantly killed 15 times as many innocent civilians as 9/11. Then they did it to a second city. The survivors took months, even years, to die. That is true.
By your definition, they would also be the “real enemy”.
They had the full support of their government and yet no one has done anything to limit their access to these bombs or to control this rogue nation.
Let me know when you figure out what should be done.