I suppose many of us thought at the time that we would not get to this point in the way that we have. We thought the world had changed and that things like irony and division were finished. When I go in to the archives of this blog and search for “9/11”, I find a lot I have written and you have writing about the day, the attacks and the implications. I wrote this in 2003, wrote this in 2004 – which includes my first post 9/11 comment on Steve’s blog – and here is what I wrote last year.
I still compare events now to the events of my younger years and the nuclear fear that gripped and consider the fall of the Berlin Wall the critical turning event I have witnessed. This would not be the same for those who, like Ian, were much much closer. But if I think of concepts like fear, solidarity, security, hope, peace, resolution, terror I do not think we have entered a new era unless that new area is one of stalemate. The stalemate includes that of the mind, of policy but also in each of our emotional relation to the event. Even with events like the bombing in London last summer, so many more people have died since in waves of response to 9/11 and in other places like Darfur; so many terrorist attacks have not occured since through both the success of security as well as the fact that there are not thousands in Al Queda waiting to shoe bomb or poison water supplies or set of a dirty bomb but far fewer with far fewer resources than we could have thought watching the towers fall; so many other events have happened since which have killed so many – especially the tsunami and New Orleans – that it may be time to think beyond the stalemate. I think that includes Canada’s fight in Afghanistan, the actual war on terror which should always have been the focus and not elsewhere. Undoing the places and the political cultures where killing and dehumanizing are taught must be done – and where they really are may have to be admitted.
More than anything, however, today my thoughts are with Trevor Greene and his family. We talk of what has changed since 9/11 and what we have given up and frankly I have given up nothing. We have not taken on a total war against terror, though we have taken on a professional one. And Trevor heard the call to join that fight to reconstruct and remake the societies in the valleys along the Afghan-Pakistan border where schools became suicide fighter training grounds, where sports stadiums became slaughter houses for militant puritan idealists, where reason was driven out – and he did so for me and us. And as the newspaper article an old friend of his and mine has linked to this morning explains, Trevor has given up much and now fights another fight I will not have to.