tp202.xml
Title
tp202.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2003-03-10
TomPaine Story: Story
Toward A More Perfect Union
We Are Not Alone
Stephen Sondheims "Into the Woods", like the best traditional fairy tales and myths, deeply resonates in reality. In the Winter issue of the Sondheim Review, comments attached the events of 9/11 to the song ""No One Is Alone"". The thought was that Americans had been brought together for comfort after the experience of terror, and that is a plausible use of half the song. There is, however, a more important implication for the present unease, and that seems not to have been noticed.
In the song, the phrase ""you are not alone"" also insists that what one does has consequences, and there is another relevant sense in which Americans are not alone. Since World War Two, our fundamentalism- economic rather than religious- has led us to kill perhaps six million people, directly or through sanctions and surrogates. Several hundred thousand of these victims have been Muslims, beginning with our replacement of the socialist government of Iran with the hereditary Shah through our recent restoration of the feudal monarchy in Kuwait and our first Afghan war in which we replaced another socialist government with primitive fundamentalists.
The 9/11 perpetrators were "our" Saudi fundamentalists left over from our first Afghan war, but now our self-appointed leaders have killed again in Afghanistan, perhaps because of all the countries in the world it is least able to fight back, and our masters feel impelled to kill somebody in retaliation for 9/11.
Adding absurdity to homicide, our leaders and press tell us that we are hated because we are so good. It is because we are not alone, and we are not careful of the things we do.
We Are Not Alone
Stephen Sondheims "Into the Woods", like the best traditional fairy tales and myths, deeply resonates in reality. In the Winter issue of the Sondheim Review, comments attached the events of 9/11 to the song ""No One Is Alone"". The thought was that Americans had been brought together for comfort after the experience of terror, and that is a plausible use of half the song. There is, however, a more important implication for the present unease, and that seems not to have been noticed.
In the song, the phrase ""you are not alone"" also insists that what one does has consequences, and there is another relevant sense in which Americans are not alone. Since World War Two, our fundamentalism- economic rather than religious- has led us to kill perhaps six million people, directly or through sanctions and surrogates. Several hundred thousand of these victims have been Muslims, beginning with our replacement of the socialist government of Iran with the hereditary Shah through our recent restoration of the feudal monarchy in Kuwait and our first Afghan war in which we replaced another socialist government with primitive fundamentalists.
The 9/11 perpetrators were "our" Saudi fundamentalists left over from our first Afghan war, but now our self-appointed leaders have killed again in Afghanistan, perhaps because of all the countries in the world it is least able to fight back, and our masters feel impelled to kill somebody in retaliation for 9/11.
Adding absurdity to homicide, our leaders and press tell us that we are hated because we are so good. It is because we are not alone, and we are not careful of the things we do.
Collection
Citation
“tp202.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed December 22, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/655.