Changed Everything

I woke up early this morning with the thought, "This is the Sunday I'm finally going to make it to All Souls UU Church and make some friends in NYC who aren't teachers." Then, I remembered that today was September 11th, and decided I didn't really want to get out of bed after all, let alone leave the house and have to face New York City in full mourning.

Maybe it's because I wasn't in New York on that day, wasn't even in the United States.
Maybe it's because of all the time I've spent in the Middle East since then and the collateral damage I've born witness to in that time.
Maybe it's because of all the harassment and difficulty my Muslim and "brown" friends across the country and the world have suffered in the interim.
Or maybe it's just because I was raised to be such a radical humanist.

I'm so tired of America putting on this big parade about how unfortunate we were to be attacked on 9/11. We've been attacked ONCE in SIXTY-FIVE years by foreign adversaries. How many nations around the world can say that? Or as my friend Ginny noted on Facebook today: 

9/11 death toll    =      2,819. 

US casualties in the wars that followed    =      6,686. 

non-US casualties in the wars that followed  =  148,000. 

It's not that I begrudge the families of the dead their mourning, their anger, their remembrance. They suffered. I would never deny them acknowledgement of that.

But I really struggle with the self-indulgence of people in Florida and California and Kansas and everywhere in between who think their lives have been irrevocably marked by what happened in New York, DC and Pennsylvania.  Did the bombing of Sarajevo change the world?  Did the fall of Mogadishu change the world?  Did the massacre on the Pearl Circle change the world?  Did the blockade of Gaza change the world?  And these are just the tragedies of the last 65 years that I can recall off the cuff.  How many hundreds more are there that we never even heard about?  It seems so arrogant to think 9/11 is so much more important.

But, of course, it's not arrogant. It's fact. 9/11 did change the world, starting a chain reaction of a magnitude we never could have imagined, which resulted directly or indirectly in massive deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, civil war in Yemen, liberation in North Africa, increased oppression in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, increased Kurdish autonomy, God-only-knows in Iran....

And maybe that's what makes me angry most of all ... that we have such overwhelming power to impose our judgements, our grief and our consequences on the rest of the world.

You're Not American

Manhattan, NY, USA

This morning, on my way back from a Pakistani wedding reception in New Jersey last night that was a delightfully glittering, delicious affair, I was doing my best to navigate through weekends on the subway. There are so many cancellations and track changes that it can be very hard to maneuver. I'm beginning to get the hang of it, but the poor Israeli tourist I met was having a much more difficult time working it out.

So there I was, trying with little success to get him to his cousin's house in Queens. "Where are you from?" he asks. "You're not American."
I protest that I am.
"But you have an accent that's not American," he insists.
"Oh, well, I've been living in Egypt and Jordan for the last few years," I offer.
He starts backing quickly away from me. "I'm your neighbor, but I speak Hebrew, not Arabic!" he calls back down the corridor at me.

I think that's the first time a complete and total stranger has ever been afraid of me!