This is a not a travel-related post, so feel free to skip if you were hoping for a miles and points or luxury travel post today. That will continue tomorrow. Instead, I hope you'll find some time on your busy Tuesday to remember and honor those whose lives changed forever on September 11 and those that continue to be the victims of terrorism and attacks (including U.S. attacks) around the world. Most of all I hope you'll spend quality time with your family, close friends, and those you love.
Just as our grandparents will always remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked and our parents will remember what they were doing when JFK was assassinated, most of us will have indelibly etched in our mind the morning of September 11. For my part, I remember it being another beautiful sunny day in Palo Alto, California, where I was in law school. I was sharing a house with several others, and came downstairs to find, instead of the usual morning bustle, two of my housemates silently staring at the TV watching the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapse. I couldn't bear to watch and numbly went through the motions of gathering my things for my Corporations class, where I was a teaching assistant. I'll never forget the way the professor looked that day. Originally from New York, he normally gave his lectures at a fast-pace and was highly articulate, but that day he not only looked visibly aged, but completely dazed, and struggled to even start his talk. Fortunately someone from the Administrative Offices came to tell him that due to the tragic events unfolding, all law school classes would be cancelled that day.
While I don't personally know anyone who was directly impacted by the 9/11 attacks or other terrorism, my heart goes out to them. My late grandfather was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked, and didn't manage to get home for many hours, during which time my grandmother assumed he was dead.
As horrific as the events of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were, I'm troubled by the aftermath. Certainly Pearl Harbor was a vital catalyst in pulling a reluctant U.S. into war against Japan and Germany, which had already by that point committed atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, in which 300,000 Chinese were estimated to have been murdered, and the killing of thousands of Jews in the early concentration camps, with construction of the first true death camps almost complete. So the U.S. becoming involved to help win the war and put an end to these regimes and their atrocities was a good thing. But many forget that in the process, the U.S. locked up and seized the possessions of many U.S. citizens–some of my Japanese American school friends had parents who were born in these internment camps, and whose families lost everything they owned. They never were able to fully reclaim the lives that had been taken away from them, and legally as well, with assistance by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Supreme Court.
The years since 9/11 have seen tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and over 7 million war refugees, in addition to several thousand deaths of U.S. soldiers. The war bills already paid and expected to be paid are estimated at over $3 trillion dollars. And we now have and continue to maintain a camp where persons, including U.S. citizens, can be detained indefinitely without being charged, with their only hope of leaving it by death. We've also had the President personally authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen without that person having been charged with a crime. It's easy to argue that the person killed was murderous and should have been dispatched, but this sets a very key precedent. It should concern anyone who values our Constitutional values and due process, regardless of other political affiliations and beliefs.
It might be worth recalling one of the final lines in Gladiator: “Is Rome worth one good man's life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again…”