September 8, 2002- The Day The World Changed
The title for today's column sounds more like the title of a science fiction movie than a column on this site. However, it is not. I took the title from something that I saw on either CNN or MSNBC earlier. It was a piece entitled this, and this piece was on (surprise!) the events of September 11th, 2001. The title of the piece told the story of what they were saying with it. The gist of it all was that the world changed on that day last year and so on and so forth. All we heard about was how everyone's life changed dramatically that day, the same shit that we have been hearing for a year now. Everything was reported in sweeping generalizations as always here. It is true that this incident was possibly the biggest thing that had ever happened in most people's lives. However, to make the sweeping statements that have come out of this about how the lives of everyone in the world were changed dramatically and all that. These statements are false at best and ludicrous at worst. While most Americans would recoil in horror at that statement, it is a truism. The fact is that the lives of most Americans were not dramatically changed that day. Most of the American people would vehemently argue that point. They cannot fathom how any American's life was not changed by these events. I for one can tell you that my life was not affected dramatically by any of this. My life today is exactly the same as my life was one year ago. Whether they want to realize it or not, the vast majority of Americans are in the same boat here, their lives have not been changed anywhere near as much as they think that they have by all of this. Yes, many Americans lives are drastically different than they were a year ago, but that would be because of different reasons. Specifically, the antics of Kenneth lay and his friends in the corporate world that have been going about steadily swindling people and cooking books and stealing money for themselves and all of these things. The financial ruin that this caused many ordinary people has changed their lives far more than the events of last September 11th. Thing is, the tendency for America to try and tie every single event that has happened in the last year to September 11th has been extraordinary. There has been virtually nothing that has happened in the country since then that the media and the American public has not attempted to tie in to the events of that fateful morning. The anthrax attacks were a prime example. Those were obviously the work of some deranged fucker that had access to that shit and that wanted to take advantage of the tumultuous situation that was around America at that time. Yes it is still an unsolved case, but when it is, it will come out that it has nothing to do with September 11th at all. Neither will the case of that stupid college dude that was putting pipe bombs in mailboxes earlier this year. He was just trying to get his fuckin' face in the media hysteria and get his Andy Warhol allotted 15 minutes of fame. But ever since September 11th, 2001, everything that comes up in America freaks the masses out and they start to wonder what the tie in is with this current event and so forth. This is the reason that so many American say that the events of that day changed the lives of everyone on the planet dramatically. But those that say that are not exactly looking at the big picture here. What really happened that day was that a hell of a lot of Americans got very traumatized. For many of these people, it was by far the worst trauma that they ever suffered in their lives. It was such a bad trauma not because of the act itself, but because of the fact that most Americans could not even fathom such a thing. The world that they inhabited was one where shit like that just did not go on, a make believe world, so to speak, the one that Rudy Giuliani spoke of a while back and that I wrote about in "The Make-Believe World" column. The American people really liked that world too. They stayed there throughout a lot of shit, but the events of last September 11th wrecked all that and put a major trauma on these people. What has come out of it all is that these same people are not very well able to handle that trauma. Americans would not do too well at that because of the culture of selfishness that pervades its society. That is the only way that this make believe world can exist. Once it is permeated like it was for so many people last year, the affected people do not know how to handle that very well. So the only thing that they know how to do is to take that trauma and foist it upon others, if they have to be traumatized and shit, then you do too. Americans are very good at this. You see it all throughout the society. If someone has a problem, they go and push that problem on others instead of dealing with it themselves. So much of the crime scene in America is fueled by this, the fathers that have their pregnant girls shot because they don't like the fact that a baby is on the way, they don't want to deal with that, the people that kill because they have a shitty life, the people that burn buildings because they have a petty dispute with someone that lives there, practically anything that gangbangers do, etc. All of this involves someone that has a problem of some kind that is determined to push that problem onto someone else. There are countless lesser examples of this in everyday American life. The culture of self-centeredness brings this about. So when you had so many people that inhabited that make believe world that were traumatized so very badly, you are going to have numbers of them that are just going to push that trauma upon everyone else because that is all that they know how to do. The problem with something of this magnitude is that the people that they pushed their traumas off on have been pushing their own ones off on others and so on. What this has led to is these traumas just spinning around and around and around the populace for a year now. That is why there are so many that are saying that everyone's life all around the world had been radically affected by this all. The lives that they have are affected by it so much, and the world that they know is radically altered, but the real world has not been anywhere nearly as dramatically affected as they think. It makes for some good dramatic stories for the news shows, but the real effects are not as far reaching as many may think.
For example, right here in America, there are lots of things that can be pointed to. Have the poor gotten a better stake in American life in the last year? Oh, so many of those traumatized people have been going on about how they had a 'spiritual awakening" because of this and are "closer to God" and all this bullshit. Well if they are, why haven't we seen a great increase in people sticking up for the rights of the poor and downtrodden in America? The poor were the people that were specifically not targeted by last year's attacks. Rather, it was Mr. Businessman and his people, and the Pentagon and the war Machine that was targeted. No poor were targets, except for those that were unfortunate enough to be near the Towers in New York and were caught in the malestrom and died that way. But there was no concerted effort to target the poor of America that day. In the ensuing year, their lives have not changed. Yes, they have gotten harder, but just by being poor and downtrodden and not included in America, their lives were destined to get worse anyhow. It never gets better for those folks under the best of circumstances for the other members of society. So their lives have not changed one iota in the last year. And don't forget that the poor and downtrodden make up an ever-larger portion of American society every year as the economic disparities get larger and larger between the rich and the poor. So there has been no dramatic change there, and these are American people that we are talking about here. Even those that are not in the poor category have not has their lives changed as much as they think. All these draconian laws that the government has passed in the last year in the name of freedom have not altered much for the common man, except if he finds himself running afoul of these new laws. Since the vast majority of American never get arrested, even under these new laws, the lives of these people have not been as drastically altered as they think. If they stay silent and let the government do all that they wish to do though, then their lives will be drastically altered because of the lengths that the government is proposing to go to in some cases. Until that happens (if it ever does), their lives are not as drastically affected here. The American people have many more problems with the American people. What with drive-by shootings and the availability of guns and the overall violent crime rate ,these radically affect Americans way more than the events of last year did. Look at this bank robbery shit that happened in Indiana recently. Two shitheads decided to try and rob a bank, and were not successful at that, they got no money at all, but in the span of 30 seconds, they managed to kill two or three people and radically alter the lives of those close to them forever. Now the families of these people are feeling the same thing that the families of those killed last year felt, except that these families are only going to be in the media a short time, not eternally talking about what happened and how it affected everyone. There are many more examples of punk ass American shits doing shit like this and visiting tragedy upon other Americans than there are major terrorist acts last last year. So there are many more American lives deeply affected by acts like these than by acts of terror. And as far as the world not being the same, that is a big fallacy too. Terrorist acts did not originate on September 11th, 2001. They have been around for many a year now, way the fuck too long actually. They have been very, very active in other parts of the world. In fact, in some of these other parts of the world, they are a regular thing, they and their acts. There have been many stories of unspeakable tragedies caused by terrorist acts in many other countries, like Russia, China, the Middle East, etc. The reactions to what happened in America last year have been far different than they have been in America. While the people there have been very sympathetic about what happened, they were nowhere near as surprised and/or shocked about it all as the Americans were. They just saw something that had been happening in their countries for a long fuckin' time now happening over in America. The same scenes of death and destruction that they have seen in their own lands was played out in America, albeit on a larger scale. But they have not had their lives changed significantly because they have learned to live with shit like this a long time ago and have adjusted accordingly. The only real way that their lives might have been changed is if they happened to live in a country that America has designated an "enemy" and is looking to attack or whatever. Countries other than this have not had daily life altered all that much. Terror has been a fact of life in many societies for a long time, and now it is a fact of life in America. The Americans have not adjusted to this fact as well as those from other lands have. To them , the entire world has changed into something evil and hostile. But they are failing to realize that this tragedy hit people in different ways not just in foreign lands, but in America too. Yes, the world did change, it is impossible to think that an events of this magnitude could not change things in a global society. But the vast majority of the world is the same as it was before all of this, the weather patterns are the same, the animals are the same, business and commerce are the same, and the everyday lives of the vast majority of the 5 billion or so people on the planet are the same. The CNNs and MSNBCs of the world can go on all they want about how everything has changed for everyone, that is mere hyperbole. However, it is hyperbole that far too many believe, and that belief will have a tendency to blind people to reality, and that is exactly the sort of thing that the terrorist fucks are going to look to take advantage of and try to put another trauma on the American people that will make last year's look tame by comparison, and then their world will change drastically once again, and since they don't seem to handle that too well, they sure as hell don't need it to happen again.