The recently released video of September 11 hijackers going through airport security has helped me to put my finger on what's bothered me about the last three-ish years. Or, you know, human history.
It seems like we are asking the wrong questions. After September 11, 2001, I remember feeling tremendous pain, hand in hand with a glimmer of hope. It felt like we had been given a tremendous opportunity to examine everything. The way we look at one another, the impact of each decision we make on the others with whom we share the planet.
And, instead, we didn't. We shrouded ourselves in a mantle of fear and righteous indignation. We willingly put on the cloak of victimhood, where there is an us and a them. We let ourselves be led into a war that we knew, at the time, was not the answer. Was not an answer. We allowed salt to be rubbed into our collective wound.
And now we look back, with commissions and reports and videos that only widen the gap between us and them, and try to ignore the fact that they are us and we are them. We try to figure out whether our technology or our leaders or our intelligence let us down, and miss the fact that it was us, with our blithe and chosen ignorance of our own history that let us down.
The video disturbs me, not because men with harmful intent made it through airport security even after there was an opportunity to stop them, but because our scrutiny of the video asks the wrong question. The question, it seems to me, should not be "how do we catch those who hope to harm?" but "what are we doing to incite feelings of hatred so strong, and how do we stop?"
I think that we are individual cells in an organism called humanity. And I don't think it's natural for an organism to be at war with itself.
