9/11

OK, I hate posting youtube videos to a blog (they're meant to be emailed to your friends, shared, cherished, together.), but this is really interesting, so I kind of have to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

There is a really amazing concept he's portraying here. The attack on the World Trade Center was an extremely tragic event, possibly the most tragic thing to happen to the United States since Pearl Harbor. But the United States can, and has gone through a lot, and it has still pulled through.

If you prick me, I will bleed/ But I have lots of blood to bleed...

No matter what your opinion of it is, the United States is a strong country. The attacks may have been just a small prick, but blood was shed nonetheless. Innocent blood, of people who didn't deserve to be murdered. The country united after the attacks; I very clearly remember the weeks after the attacks. We may have been divided as to strategy, but we had one objective. We had been attacked, but we were still strong. A few years later, we'd lost that unity, but after such a tragedy, we had been able to come together.

Pump that area... /But don't give in to the hysteria.

After such a horrific act, many people were enraged. They wanted (and still want) war. People so often need an enemy to blame after being attacked like we were. Some one has to pay, they think. This rage was used by the Bush administration, for whatever reason, to gain support for the war in Iraq. By making people believe in links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, he made Hussein that enemy that people so desperately wanted to destroy. People forgot what really happened on September 11, 2001, because they wanted someone to be punished. "9/11" became a propaganda phrase; attaching it to something got people to support any action taking, no matter how obviously wrong, no matter how obviously unconstitutional.

If you mug me, I won't run, I won't run to get my gun...

Terrorism is not just an attack. The main objective of terrorism is to strike fear in the majority of the target population, not just to kill. The reason al-Qaeda attacked the world trade center was because it was such a famous symbol, and destroying that symbol would scare the rest of the country. By being scared, and blindly fighting whatever "enemy" we are told to attack, we are making 9/11 a successful mission. Do we want those people who died that day to have died in vain? No? So we can't join the hysteric masses, we must know what we're dealing with.

Who is our greater enemy: the terrorists, or ourselves for believing them?