Some Thoughts on Post 9/11 America

Helen Brandt, Ph.D., writes articles and follows the foreign press from her home in Whatcom County.

Perhaps it revealed an unexpected result of repeated television broadcasts showing the disaster of the day. After watching the made-for-TV war in Kuwait, school shootings in Colorado and Oregon, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, people being incinerated by napalm in Vietnam, Cambodians massacred—the list can go on—I found that the 9/11 events produced little emotional reaction in myself. Of course, this is not something one would readily confide to one’s friends. They might construe it as indifference to suffering, a deficiency in one’s basic humanity.

I have wondered if it makes any difference to one’s family, whether your death occurred along with a few others, such as when a shooter enters an office and kills several co-workers, or whether your death occurred along with several thousand others, as on 9/11. The pain must be the same to the family members, either way. And whether the father killed came from Long Island or came from Kandahar, the psychological impact of the loss on his children is the same.

Just as vaccinations protect against disease, repeated television reporting of killings seems to allow one to come to expect it and shrug it off. Tune in tomorrow morning for the day’s coverage of the latest atrocities: Belfast, Tel Aviv, Washington, Bosnia, New York. The roulette wheel spins — where will it stop today?

At some point one’s emotional batteries run down. Maybe that is why my friend went for a walk across the woods on Lummi Island on the morning of 9/11. I went out in the garden and pulled weeds. At least in one small garden area, things can be controlled, can make sense. And, thankfully, the birds, squirrels, and buzzing things knew nothing about the human events. The quiet and their familiar sounds were reassuring.

I had hoped that one constructive result of 9/11 would be an increase in attention by the media to the day-to-day lives of people in other parts of the world. Certainly it would be helpful if we were more familiar with what people in Egypt, Malaysia, Tajikistan, and Peru are thinking. If we had been aware of the currents in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and Syria, the depth of their resentments and the reasons for them would not have come as a surprise. And George W. Bush, Jr. could not have proposed simplistic explanations such as “They hate us because we stand for freedom.”

In the year that has passed, there seems to have been an increase in call-in and talkback shows. Opinion displaces substantive knowledge. Aside from the Asheigh Banfield reports on MSNBC, there has been no increase in televised in-depth coverage of non-European countries. So foreign journalism languishes, and continues to be an expensive and unappreciated undertaking.

The one promising development since the Gulf War has been the growth of the Internet and the broadening of popular access to it. With a media search engine such as Newslink (http://newslink.org) it is possible to bypass CNN, Fox, ABC, and the others. Find out for yourself what people in other countries are saying, instead of watching simplified versions fed to us by employees of U.S. media conglomerates. And if you are so moved, you can write a letter to the editor of a newspaper in a country half way across the globe as easily as you can write to The Bellingham Herald.

I sent an e-mail to a newspaper in Uzbekistan complimenting them on an article they had run and received a response from the author who was living in Vladivostok, Russia. One advantage of this is that people in other countries will increasingly discover the United States’ government does not necessarily express the opinions of its citizens. Our thoughts are diverse and we are free to express them. This is a fact worth sharing with people in non-democratic countries.