In Light of Recent Events…
Sharon September 11th, 2009
I never quite know what to say about the anniversary of September 11 - for me, the experience as a whole for Americans seems to be summed up by this cartoon, that ran in the New Yorker a few months afterwards, when people started telling jokes again. Whenever I ask myself what 9/11 did to America, I find myself back to the cartoon - the idea that we changed how we framed nearly everything - and actually changed almost nothing.
Anyway, I think you should read The Automatic Earth today, if you haven’t already. Read Ilargi’s essay, and the piece by JS Kim that follows it. More things are going to come crashing down, I fear, and I wonder whether we’ll be changed - or whether we’ll simply reframe our language to make it seem as though we are.
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I don’t know if it’s true that we haven’t changed… many of us have changed a great deal almost as a direct result.
I know folks who resigned their jobs and began changing the way they viewed the world, largely because of the anger they felt by the government and the medias management of 9/11. I know more folks who have grown to distrust the government now than I knew after Watergate and many of them are doing things very differently now years later.
Poor folks sure do a lot of migrating around looking for jobs than they did back then and wondering where they can illegally camp, couch surf or panhandle.
Perhaps much depends upon where you started on 9/10/01?
I changed some but it hardly destroyed my personal view of the world or what was and is important in life but if I had been younger I might have felt that way. I was 17 when RFK and MLK were assasinated and it was pretty fearful then. After 9/11, I remember being very nervous for a few days being afraid of much wider attacks-like nuclear or something or a world wide war that would be more than the war on terrorism or invading Afghanistan.
What has amazed me about 9/11 then and ever since was the reaction of “Why do they hate us so much?” I wondered that people could be so ignorant of the rest of the world that did they think “they” would love us because we’re Americans-or really, the United States of America????
As for the TAE today, there is another man writing from a purely financial point of view of finiance and politics that says pretty much the dire things that Ilargi and Stoneleigh say most of the time. He’s Karl Denninger at http://www.marketticker.com.
I hope it’s okay to put his name and link here. If sharon, you want to edit that out, it’s okay with me.
Peace to All of US (bloggers and readers here and all of the US citizens, too and residents),
Shamba
CORRECTION to above link: Denninger should be
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
Sorry.
I was a teacher when 9/11 happened, and I guess it woke me up to the fact that we were not invulnerable. Since then I have looked at every neighborhood in which we have lived and tried to evaluate- if it all came crashing down, would we have water? food? shelter? medicine? I even had a dream shortly after in which we were standing on a ridge (close to where we lived) north of Nashvile, from which the bright lights of the city could be seen. I dreamed that the people of the small towns on the ridge gathered to watch the lights of the city go out in a wave of darkness. Apparently they weren’t coming back on. Nobody was mad in the dream- we just lit our lanterns and walked home as thousands of stars came out.
I check TAE quite frequently- it reminds me of sitting in my grandparents’ living room back in the 70s before my Grandfather died, listening to him and his brother and Granny talk about the world going you-know-where in a hand-basket as they watched the evening news and Grandpa fought dozing off. They were in the process of losing the farm bit-by-bit to developers, the farm my Grandpa and his brothers stayed out of college to save during the Depression, and were pretty doubtful about where everything was headed. I’m glad to see somebody really intelligently stating some truths that liberals and conservatives can agree on.