A Beginning and An End

A photojournalist’s picture of one of the NY twin towers after a plane hit

Why is it that we, almost always, remember only that which agonized us?

This, a picture of a man falling – almost serenely – from one of the doomed twin towers in New York, was prohibited from media publication in the days that followed the attack on America on September 11, 2001. A man who presumably chose instant death, after a brief flight of open-air and breezy freedom, over demise by rapid immolation in the fires that raged near the top of the tower. Fires that prevented his escape from a certain unknown and unheralded end. He chose to be seen! He had no way of knowing that he would be seen, of course. Nor did he care that his picture was taken.

It was a beginning for a reaction from America that would involve two declared wars, hundreds of thousands of – mostly innocent – deaths, millions scarred forever, and trillions of taxpayer dollars siphoned, wasted, and recycled to rich corporations… over two decades. Evil on an unimaginable scale, in other words. What of all this agony?

Every year, we hold memorial ceremonies for those lost on 9/11. It’s always tearful, soulful, and in so many ways fulfilling to the American psyche. Yet it makes me want to scream: what of the hundreds of thousands murdered in the name of vengeance, of “fighting terror with terror?” Who remembers those innocents with anything approaching this feeling, this pomp and ceremony? I have asked – and received no answer from the administration. Why should they care?

Yes… we are a society that loves its junk food. For the body, and for the soul.

If this is leadership through democracy in your mind, forgive me: it reflects brutal hegemony to me, the very evil that so-called “terrorists” and “subversives” give their lives fighting to defeat. “Oh,” you say, “democracies are flawed, and always make mistakes! We must LEARN from them!” Pray tell: what are we to learn from 20 years of our “mistakes?”

An Afghan falling from a US plane taking off from Kabul

Two decades later, in an unceremonious departure from Afghanistan, forced by an almost bloodless and breathtakingly rapid takeover by the same fundamentalist regime that we’d replaced there with our invasion of that nation, we leave to an eerily similar scene repeating.

Another man falling. From a large plane.

This time it’s a young Afghan, one among many that fell from that plane to which they clung as it took off… a desperate gesture that almost seemed to say “do not leave us here after promising us freedom.” And no, this wasn’t the only tragedy: in retaliation for a terrorist attack on the airfield, Americans shot a missile from a drone at an aid worker carrying water to his vehicle in a can killing him and many children of a family. There are also reports of American soldiers firing into crowds in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack that killed 13 of our own. America going berserk, again. Innocents dead and murdered again. But we did not mean to do it.

An ignoble end to a two decades-long occupation of a far-east nation.

The ultimate result of our occupation of Afghanistan? The terrorist organization, Al-Qaeda, that once lived as rats do in burrows within that nation’s mountains, is now an integral part of the government of the nation. Sirajuddin Haqqani, of the Haqqani militant network designated by the UN as a terrorist organization, is their newly-minted interior minister.

Yay for democracy! Yay for America!

Do we ever ask: “What, in our own actions, originated such hatred and desperation? What part did we play?”