Two Years Later

So yesterday was September 11th. I didn’t exactly want to write something yesterday because I knew that everyone would already be inundated with a plethora of 9-11 thoughts, propaganda, memories, and empty speculation. I really didn’t want to even say anything to the topic of 9-11 this year in the hopes that we’d all just forget about it soon, but for some reason everyone wants to keep remembering it and, it almost seems, celebrating it.

I walked into work at the prep school yesterday and the first thing I saw was a sign with a picture of the two towers on fire with the tagline “Never Forget” underneath. I continued walking down the hall and then down the stairs to the computer lab and as I did, I noticed these signs were plastered throughout the school. What an odd thing to put up. The signs also raise a lot of questions about what exactly they mean.

You have a picture of the two burning towers—a result of one of the greatest acts of terrorism in our time. In response to that act, the US went on a rampage against “terror”. In that rampage, we decimated Afghanistan, tore apart Iraq, and are now occupying it. I’m sure the sign is meant to convey to us that we shouldn’t forget the people killed in those two towers, but if this is a memorial about lost lives shouldn’t we be thinking about all of the people killed as a result of this action?
Obviously I’m not asking you to have remorse for Bin Laden or anything, but we should remember that as a result of 9-11 the US went on a killing rampage. We, somewhat justifiably, killed terrorists in Afghanistan to eliminate the threat of further terrorism to our country and, to a degree, to exact revenge for the tragedy that was the twin towers. Most people will not see this as a bad thing, and for the most part I don’t think it was too bad, but what we went on to do afterwards is what really gets me wondering.