nmah1459.xml

nmah1459.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-07

I was late arriving at my Adelaide home (around 11 pm) on a winter night. I turned on the TV hoping to find out what had happened to a refugee boat that had apparently run aground on Ashmore Reef. Australia's uncompassionate response to refugee boats and the turning away of the Tampa was foremost in my mind, and was a source of anger and discomfort.

Instead, my TV showed smoke billowing from the WTC. When they said a plane had hit the building I immediately thought of a book I'd read of a plane hitting the Empire State Building in the 1940s. I thought it must be an horrendous accident, and couldn't work out how it could have happened. I had visited New York in 1996 and had stood at the top of both the Empire State and the WTC. Suddenly, looking at that TV, I was back in New York. I was American too. I couldn't speak, and could only watch.

Then, live, I saw the second plane come into shot and fly straight into the second building. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was instantly obvious this was no accident. What had been unbelievably horrible was now something far beyond that. The world had changed, and the world's most powerful nation was being brought to its knees as I watched. I phoned people. I remember saying "turn on your TV. It doesn't matter what channel. It's on all of them." I was watching most of the night. I remember the towers falling, and it was like a nightmare.

I didn't cry until about three days later. I was cleaning out a cupboard and a photo fell to the floor. It was a shot I'd taken from the top of the World Trade Centre, looking down. It was pretty much the view some of the people who jumped or fell to their deaths would have seen as they fell. I cried for a long time.

Yes. In the rest of September I was glued to the TV at every possible moment, but I never heard anyone ask the obvious question: "why was America attacked?" Nobody discussed the reasons for terrorism. Nobody asked why America, and by the obvious extrapolation, the West generally, was hated. The talk was all retaliation, attack and war. I felt angry too, but I wanted to know the reasons, and nobody else seemed to want to know. Osama bin Laden's name was mentioned within hours, and a possible attack on Afghanistan was proposed within hours. Nobody commented on the fact the terrorists almost all came from Saudi Arabia. There was idiotic 'evidence' such as a terrorist's passport that survived a plane crash, explosion, fire and building collapse, and was found on top of the mound intact and unsinged. Sure.

I thought it strange when I watched (live) George Bush, at a school, being told of the attack. On the other side of the world, apparently I knew long before he did!! I still think that's pretty weird.

I remember George W Bush going on TV, I think on September 12, and saying "Go Shopping". That was in a sense more shocking even than September 11. Go shopping? Men were sorting debris at Ground Zero into buckets of rubble and buckets of body parts, and people were supposed to go shopping? Buy anything, (because nobody needs to be told to buy essentials). Just go shopping.

I realised then that Western civilisation, with its rampant consumption, its lack of concern for the price other people pay for our wealth, its lack of concern for the planet or the environment, and its love of corporations and big business at the expense of ordinary working people, is degenerate. Money (especially for the rich) is all that matters. The people who died were expendable provided the people left behind go on shopping. I realised what I was watching was beyond propaganda -- it was brainwashing.

I turned my TV off in October and haven't watched it since. I read widely now, and listen to the radio. My life is suprisingly much richer because I've dispensed with the TV. There's nothing I miss. I'm frequently amazed at the rubbish people come out with after watching TV. They obviously haven't thought anything through at all, and are just parroting what they've heard. Everyone around me seems to be talking in slogans and jingles. It's actually quite frightening.

The people who died. Those wonderful, courageous people who went in to rescue people; the firemen and policemen, and all the others who rose to the pinnacles of what it means to be human. It brought out the best and worst of people.

We should also remember G.W.Bush saying "Go Shopping", and really get to the bottom of what that meant and the ramifications of that. It still makes me ill -- seeing those towers was the most awful thing I've seen, and the official response from the White House was "go shopping".

No flag because I'm not in America.

I've become rather anti-American as a result. Not anti-American really -- I love America, and I love the ordinary American people I've met there. It's a fabulous country and has wonderful, generous and friendly people. What I've turned against is the arrogance, the bellicose talk, the blindness to causes of terrorism, the blindness to the sufferings of others who have been victims of terrorist attacks for many years, the warmongering, the superiority complex, the global sherrif attitude. (Australia has been doing plenty of all that too, so I've become anti-Australian too.)

I didn't think much of G.W.Bush before September 11, but I think far less of him now. I think you'd be much better off with a man of intelligence at the helm, and the world would be much safer. I feel like the boy in the Emperor's new clothes fable -- wake up America, your President is a moron with an IQ of about 90!

As for your flag -- I think the planet would be better off without flags. There are huge problems on this planet and we can only solve them through unity. War solves nothing. Hatred solves nothing. Flags signify separation and superiority -- neither of which is helpful.

My greatest wish would be that September 11 was the beginning of the end of hatred, and the beginning of a period where the world worked as one to try to find solutions for our many problems. The only way to win the 'war on terror' is to tackle the causes of terrorism.