It’s been a year. I haven’t talked much about …
It’s been a year.
I haven’t talked much about the whole issue, partly because I don’t think I’m qualified, but also because I saw equal amounts of idiocy on both sides of the fence, too much mud in what should have been a clear-cut affair. Also, more than a few of my favorite blogs quickly became unreadable after 9/11 because the authors began wallowing in useless propaganda and lost their attraction. I didn’t want that to happen here, and I couldn’t have pulled it off anyway. I will continue to whinge about my own, petty life here in Taipei. But today I thought I would write something perhaps a little more relevant to the subject on most people’s minds today.
When I was in New York in 1999, studying filmmaking, the twin towers were always there. I never went up to the top, preferring the much-romanticized Empire State Building observation deck instead, but we did go inside the WTC and film downstairs. The towers loomed over me as I shot many a scene in lower Manhattan. I couldn’t get my mind around them being gone last year, and I still can’t quite do it today. The very idea that someone would…ok, again, I don’t wish to get into a rant here. Plenty of other websites have been churning out the same for the last trip around the sun, and will continue to do so. All I can honestly say is that I wish the kind of people who carried out the attacks didn’t exist.
For a whole year I’ve tried to see this whole thing from the other side, tried to discover some kind of reason behind the attacks, read a lot of articles and opinions. I have to admit, however, that I’ve completely failed. I can’t find any scrap of evidence strong enough to sway me from my opinion that the people who planned and carried out 9/11 are…well, words fail me. The whole ‘dregs of humanity’ shtick still contains the word ‘humanity’, and I can’t find any evidence of that in their actions. I’ve also tried to find space in my head for the idea that this whole thing should be resolved politically and without bloodshed, but again I’ve come up against a wall. I don’t agree with many of the curtails of rights in the US. I was dismayed to find that W had been voted president by the Supreme Court, but no matter what I think of the man, he’s the one in the hot seat. I’m hoping that the worst is overwith, but something tells me it’s not. It could very well be that the peace and stability the world has experienced during the first three decades of my life were more of an aberration than the status quo my generation has assumed it to be.
