a politcal coming of age
apparently osama bin laden, al qaida, and the taliban were responsible. and people wanted revenge. i felt that way too. but within a few days i started thinking about the endgame. we could punch back. but then what? if you indiscriminately bomb countries that “harbor terrorists” you’re probably gonna piss off some would-be terrorists.
it occured to me that the appropriate response lay in eliminating the seeds of terrorism: reducing poverty, fighting for social justice, and improving american public relations (aka foreign policy) around the world.
i just hoped the people who decided our countries’ official response would come to the same conclusion. that they would rise above the mass retaliatory knee-jerk gripping the country. it didn’t seem like they would, and looking back, we know that they did everything but.
less than a week later, a teach-in entitled understanding the attack on america was scheduled at unc. the gist of this impromptu panel was that our politicized and schizophrenic american foreign policy has a pretty crappy track record. this was not to say we deserved what we got, but rather to understand current events within the context of recent history.
i had no real sense of politcal identity before september 11th, feeling as out of touch with the “liberal” democrats as their “socially conservative” republican counterparts. but at this teach-in i discovered a group of people calling themselves progressives, who were much more politically and socially innovative than your average democrat.
in a single instant what had previously been loosely connected feelings and my gut responses to current events coalesced with the existence of a way to communicate them.
Does this all have anything to do with your response to the movie? Did it have an effect on you?
yes and yes.
I’m taking to calling myself a radical leftist.
after 9/11 it didn’t make sense to be just a moderate liberal anymore.
I like it when you have multi posts on a theme.
thanks. the movie got me remembering some pre-blog times.