Monday 12 September 2011

try to remember that kind of september

Pausing to reflect on the events of 11 September and recalling the sorrow shared over the fact that the perpetrators, whomever they might be, felt that what they were doing would result in a greater good, however that might be measured. The events and the reverberating response, magnfied and rippling through the years, are tragic and with little solace.
The conditioning (the "new-normal"), posturing and policy that came about through loss and fear projected should not be coddled and commemorated like the endless state of war and blind vigilance these prevailing attitudes have inspired. For those who suffered personal loss on 11 September or in the decade of conflict and incarceration that followed should never be expected to forget or move on and should be allowed to grieve in their own ways, but no matter how sadness is screwed up into revenge, hate, vitriol and unthinking, I do not believe that the legacy of those losses of that day and of the days and years that followed should be transmuted into practices and protocol that have radically changed things for the worse, bred intolerance and curtailed liberties.
That's the other shared sorrow, and that is no tribute and a grave dishonour. Too many words already lost their meaning in theatre and farce.  If anything the solidarity and the recognition that we all belong to one another, should be the point-of-departure of 11 September and not what's been sown.