Tom Hayden: Blinded by fright

[marmar]

from the Detroit Metro Times:




Blinded by fright
We're 10 years past the Twin Towers attack and still fighting wars in its name. Can we open our eyes in time?

By Tom Hayden
Published: September 7, 2011


After witnessing the first jetliner crash into the Twin Towers on that Sept. 11 morning, a friend of mine's wife and 7-year-old daughter fled to their nearby Manhattan loft and ran to the roof to look around. From there, they saw the second plane explode in a rolling ball of flaming fuel across the rooftops. It felt like the heat of a fiery furnace.

Not long after, the girl was struck with blindness. She rarely left her room. Her parents worked with therapists for months, trying various techniques including touch and visualization, before the young girl finally recovered her sight.

"The interesting new development," my friend reports, "is that she no longer remembers very much, which she told me when I asked her if she would be willing to speak with you."

That's what happened to America itself 10 years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be charged that many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://metrotimes.com/culture/blinded-by-fright-1.1198814

[Fuddnik]

1. Ack! Accidentally unrecced.

Sorry.

[David Sky]

4. I will cancel that out with my rec. This is what we should be reading,

in my opinion. Ten years is enough time to BEGIN to get some perspective. All I see is a large number of stupid politicians tampering with our freedoms and rights, all while waving a magic USA flag on their suit coat lapel.

I can't even drive to Canada anymore without a $130 passport, a trip I used to make once or twice a year, a small inconvenience, I know,compared to the thousands who have since lost their lives serving in the military, and the tens of thousands who have lost limbs fighting those wars for little or no purpose.

[saras]

2. What I remember is how obsessively Americans watched it OVER and OVER and OVER

If you saw it in life, you saw it once, and then your vision was filled with the aftermath, and the work of cleaning it up, and the suffering, and the incompetence, and the everyday heroism of humanity.

The rest of the country saw ten thousand planes crash into ten thousand buildings. No wonder it was so traumatic.

[yurbud]

3. if people took the blinders off, they would be horrified not just at what we have done to ourselves

but the over a million people we killed in Iraq who had nothing to do with the attacks and even the Afghans we continue to kill, 92% of whom one poll found had no idea why we are in their country.

[katty]

5. War, God, Religion: one size fits all for imperial behavior