....LMB: "Jake's Official 9/11 Post"....

September 10, 2002

I’m not going to pretend to know what to say here.

I’ll just tell one brief tale.

In the hours and days following the terrorist attack, I was glued to the internet, and watched many a conversation flow via email lists and bulletin boards.

It was ugly out there. Real ugly.

Anger, hate, bloodlust, vengeance. Calls for the death of the “sand niggers” and “towel heads.” Normally rational people suddenly announcing that they were going to join the army so that they could kill some Arabs. One memorable message saying that the U.S. and Russia should line up all their nuclear weapons and incinerate everything from Marrakesh to New Delhi.

And there was fear. Lots and lots of fear. Some who were certain that Los Angeles was going to be hit next, that same day. A man said that we should organize a citizen patrol to guard the local reservoir, because maybe the terrorists were going to put anthrax or smallpox in the water supply. A fellow who thought that it would be a miracle if he were still alive by Thanksgiving.

I suppose I was better equipped mentally to deal with the terrorist attacks and its fallout than many. Some years previous I’d done research and writing about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and the Taliban. Not extensively, but enough to have a decent understanding of the situation. Enough to know who bin Laden was and what his grudges were against the United States. Enough to know (well, believe) that another imminent terrorist attack against the U.S. was unlikely. Enough to know that a U.S. assault on Afghanistan was a possibility.

What I saw most clearly, though, was a direct parallel between the behavior of the angry, fearful Americans, and the terrorists.

The terrorists, furious with the U.S. government and its treatment of the people of the Middle East, attacked the citizens of the U.S., as though the government and its people were one and the same. They killed thousands of people who’d maybe never even met a Muslim, let alone oppressed one, when their real grievance was with a handful of policy-makers.

And some of the angry and scared Americans I saw were making similar generalizations. I saw them calling for the deaths of all Afghans, all Arabs, or all Muslims, confusing the actions of a murderous few with a much larger group. Just as very few Americans set U.S. foreign policy, very few south and central Asians have committed terrorist atrocities.

People around me were calling for the blood of many. And when I argued that killing the innocent should be avoided, they said that I was on the side of the terrorists. That was a low point.

I realized that the people who were the most irrational, the ones who called out most fiercely for war, the ones who were most utterly fucking terrified, were the ones who were the least informed.

This stayed with me. The most fearful were the ones who had the least knowledge.

It’s something I’ve been doing for years, learning things and then teaching what I’d just discovered to others. Back in high school I was often sort of an unofficial teaching assistant, quickly absorbing the day’s lesson in math or physics or history, and then helping out my classmates who hadn’t caught it on the first try.

I’m still doing it, I suppose, but I’ve switched from the classroom to the newsroom. I do my best to figure out what the hell’s going on in this crazy world of ours, and then pass my opinion along. Not everyone has the time, energy or resources to research every little thing like I do, so I try to help fill that gap.

I’d stopped writing back in 1999, just too many things to juggle in my life. But then I saw these terrified folks last September, and realized that maybe if they’d had some of the facts in advance, maybe they wouldn’t have been so frightened, maybe they could have coped a little easier. It was a sort of kick in the pants that got me to resume this self-appointed task, to learn and to teach, in my own particular way.

Well, while we're on the topic of what drives me, I’ll go one step further. I have three main goals through all my writings and political activism:

1) get people to really see and think about the world around them;
2) get people to really think about what kind of world they’d like to live in;
3) get people to take action, any action, that will make the real world a little more like their ideal world.

That’s it. No matter what your beliefs or goals or passions, there’s probably something you can do move them closer to reality. And you’re probably going to have to do it yourself, because no one else is going to.

There you go.

We now return you to the sound and fury already in progress.