Yet it singles out American tragedies as the be-all end-all. Anyways, here's my opinion on 9/11 and America. Note that I did make a new thread for this.
My own view is that there's a 9/11 every day. Africa, for instance, has historically been plagued with death, disease, and destruction ever since white colonialists set foot on the continent. There are children who are tortured every day by hunger, malnutrition, and disease. There are children who die every day and never get to experience the quality of life that we do. There are parents who witness these children die and grieve on how they could never provide for them. Such is life.
I believe that Americans are so affected by 9/11 because, as was mentioned, it happened in America. For some of us, it affected us on a personal level, whether or not we knew someone who died. And then a good proportion of Americans jumped onto the bandwagon. It lashed at our pride and economy, was hyped by the media and government, evoked thoughts of Pearl Harbor, and made a forceful attempt to personalize a tragedy, unlike the monotonous voice of news reporters who report murders and whatnot.
Yet I do not have much pride in my country, so it is not personal to me. In my mind, America is a domestic democracy and an international tyrant. Take, for example, the way we treated Africa in the 1960's and 70's. We dismantled a democracy in the Congo and replaced it with a dictatorship that became Zaire. We tried to do the same in Angola, but fortunately, after a decade of injustices, we failed. And then twenty years later the Senate made an investigation and decided that America was guilty of wrongdoing in Africa. It's great to have hindsight, but it's foresight that prevents mistake, and we are myopic if not blind in that area.
Our country enforces its ideas on others like crusaders. Iraq is like a political jihad. Ironically, we have our own iron curtain of democracy. And even more ironically, we are not a democracy, but a republican politocracy (forgive the neologism). America does not treat others the way it would like to be treated. We condemned the communists for spreading their ideology, yet we impose our own. We impose a Red, White, and Blue scare.
We claim the separation of Church and State, yet that very phrase paints Christianity as the "right religion." The aesthetics in its pronunciation is not reason enough to impose this. Religion penetrates our courts as well -- the judges of right and wrong in America keep religious ornamentation and uphold religious recitation in the same room that they make their verdict in.
I think America needs to live up to what it claims to be. We claim to be a nation of equals, why shouldn't we be a world of equals? Because they're uneducated? That's the common excuse. Yet the majority of Americans are uneducated, hence our current administration.
I do view the loss of any life as tragic. But if I were to mourn the loss of every life I would never escape the state of mourning. So you have to choose to mourn the losses that you are personally affected by. And I am more affected by the miserable lives of people in underdeveloped nations than I am by a rare tragedy in such a luxurious nation as the US, which, for reasons I lengthily described, I do not respect.
I respect all of your opinions and only wish to better understand those who are in contention.
