Exactly 18 years ago today the United States experienced the worst terrorist attack on US soil.  Nineteen men hijacked four fuel loaded U.S. commercial airplanes bound for west coast cities.  The planes were intentionally flown into both the North and South tower of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington DC.  A fourth plane was diverted by courageous passengers and crash landed in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The death toll was as follows.

• Pennsylvania – 40 passengers and crew members
• Washington DC – 184 Pentagon employees
• New York City – 2753 workers including 343 FDNY fire fighters, 23 NYPD officers and 37 Port Authority officers.

Since the attack over 241 NYPD officers and an additional 202 FDNY firefighters have died from respiratory illnesses related to the toxic plume of dust at ground zero.

I lived in New York at the time of the disaster.  I had only lived here for five months when this city was stabbed in the heart.  Although my apartment was over three miles away from the World Trade Center, my neighborhood of Kensington Brooklyn was covered in a fine dust of pulverized glass, concrete, steel and human remains that covered victims at ground zero. The ash fell so subtly and faintly that I didn’t notice it until the next morning when every car was suddenly covered in a light gray powder.  I felt the same gritty ash between my fingers as it collected on the only window sill that was downwind of the attack.

After 9/11 I naively thought that this day would be remembered with reverence by all Americans.  Sadly the event has turned into a political football of sorts, tossed around and exploited to serve any number of purposes. The right wing used the disaster as a rallying call to war.  The US dropped bombs on Afghanistan a month after the attack  then invaded Iraq under completely dubious claims that Iraq was somehow connected to the event.

The fringes of the left wing have gone in a completely different direction.  Many have cynically decided that the attack on 9/11 was well deserved for the many abuses and atrocities the US government has committed in the Middle East and elsewhere.  On August 23rd, 2019 a left wing pundit affiliated with the online news network The Young Turks, Hasan Piker flippantly joked on his own twitch account.

America deserved 9/11

I’m not sure where the humor was in his statement but Piker later apologized, although he was less than contrite.  When 9/11 happened Piker was a 4th grader living in Turkey.  Perhaps his youth and inexperience might play a role here.  However Piker is not alone, I have seen similar sentiments promoted by others on the far left.

In some ways I get why Piker might actually believe what he said, why it was easy to let those words come flying out of his mouth.   If I tried to list all of the fiascos the US government has facilitated or exacerbated in foreign countries this article would be several volumes long.  From South and Central America to the Middle East, Asia and beyond the U.S. government has purposefully and indirectly caused great destruction and massive loss of life.  In the case of Iran our government destroyed a democracy while propping up corrupt dictators all in the name of cheap oil.  Even when we are trying to stop violence our policies have often had unintended deadly consequences.  Our attempts to curb drug trafficking and limit the power of drug cartels led to wide spread human rights abuses in places like Columbia.  Most of our attempts to stymie various Socialist regimes have been fruitless. The U.S. government is hardly an innocent bystander in world affairs.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Piker’s point of view, however I don’t think the nearly 3000 people who perished on 9/11 deserved to die.  It also seems incongruous that so called anti-war progressives would be comparing body counts. A new stack of bodies does not undo a prior injustice.  No one surveyed all 2977 victims and asked them detailed questions about America’s role in the many problems plaguing the Middle East.

The victims of 9/11 died because they were American.  The terrorists would have just as easily killed any of the smug, self-important, armchair foreign policy experts who dismiss the attack.  The average American knows little about our legacy of foreign intervention.  Most citizens of any country are not experts on the misdeeds of their government.  We can vote and protest but if our elected officials decide to manipulate or decimate a sovereign nation there’s little a single voter can do about it.

Timothy McVeigh used the exact same reason to justify the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building.  In that domestic terrorist attack, 168 civilians including 19 children lost their lives because McVeigh thought his fertilizer bomb would start a revolution of sorts against the U.S. government.  McVeigh saw himself as a righteous revolutionary avenging the many sins of this country.  McVeigh believed earnestly that the U.S. government had acted tyrannously against its own people, so in his mind the deaths he caused were justified. This eye for an eye, tit for tat mentality just fuels the same exact rhetoric that causes incidents like 9/11 and the bombing of Afghanistan.  War at its simplest form is vengeance for a past injustice.  Does the far left really want to promote this ideology?

Does Russia now get to invade Germany and kill 24-26 million people?  Does China get to slaughter 20 million Japanese?  Do the Japanese get to pick two strategic US cities and nuke them into oblivion?  Do Native Americans now have the moral high ground to seize every acre of land stolen from them and commit genocide on roughly 330 million people?  Of course I could keep going the list would be endless.  Every major world power would be invaded and decimated if vengeance was exacted for their many sins.  Why not open the floodgates?

There’s also a lot of distance in between being highly critical of the US government and being a cheerleader for our enemy.  Why does it have to be all or nothing?  Can’t a person be both against the policies of their government and still mourn their dead?  Why do some folks on both extremes of the political divide live as if we are in a sporting match to the death and must reject anything and everything that the opposing side promotes?  Mourning our dead should be not be a partisan issue.

To anyone who thinks America deserved 9/11, I’d like to point out that New York City still paid the heaviest price.  People living in Iowa didn’t have to see the plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan every day for months after the attack.  Folks in Northern California didn’t have to listen to fighter jets flying overhead amid the silence of a city completely shutdown.  Texans didn’t have to reach down to help a stranger on the street as they collapsed from grief.  Fourth graders in Turkey didn’t feel the sharp grit of pulverized glass, cement and human remains between their finger tips.  New York City had been a target before 9/11 and has been a target since the attack.  While some cavalier pundit like Piker is out walking his dog we will be digging up dead bodies and cleaning blood off our streets.

Ironically when that same US government decided to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to fight a war in Iraq for bogus reasons New Yorkers came out in record numbers to protest against it.  Those of us closest to the dead and dying didn’t want any more bloodshed in our name.  We didn’t want to be used as an excuse for bombs being dropped on civilians or some kind of personal vendetta for our then president.  Most of us accept that we will probably face another attack.  Every time we get on the subway we know that a suicide bomber could annihilate us in an instant.  It’s simply become the price of living here.

The other unintended consequence of a statement like “America deserved 9/11” is that it  only fuels a right wing propaganda machine that promotes the idea that all liberals are cruel, self-centered, elitists who hate this country.  Someone like Piker might need to be reminded that 4 out of 10 American voters  identify as moderates or independents.  Most voters in the middle might find a statement like “America deserved 9/11′ as repugnant.

As time moves forward 9/11 will become a distant act with long dead victims who become more faceless and inconsequential with every passing year.  Both sides will continue to exploit the attack for whatever agenda they think they can use it for.  For me it will always remain a beautiful fall day when suddenly a city full of 8.4 million people was stabbed in the heart.  I will never forget.  The lives of Americans do not mean less than the lives of Afghanis or Iraqis.  If we are really going to promote pacifism then it must be done across the board.  It’s not enlightened or progressive to mock the death of your own citizens as a means of political discourse, it’s just hateful.

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