{"id":37901,"date":"2011-05-03T16:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T21:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=37901"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:52:59","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:52:59","slug":"on-the-chirping-of-little-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/on-the-chirping-of-little-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Chirping of Little Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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May 1, 2011. Photo by Eric Francis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You and I felt it Sunday night.\u00a0 For that split second in time, when the cool voice of President Obama pronounced those words, we found ourselves in a profound moment of disbelief. Usama bin Laden — dead. Staying up late, we watched the streets of Times Square in New York and in front of the White House\u00a0erupt\u00a0in jubilance at the announcement of bin Laden’s death at the hands of the United States military’s special ops team, the Navy SEALs. As we watched, there was a strange feeling of having been excised of a very large malignancy on our\u00a0nation’s psyche\u00a0— one we have been living with for so long that it had become part of our cultural expression.<\/p>\n

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I’m not sure if I know what else to feel at the news of bin Laden’s death, except maybe sensing\u00a0his removal from the planet as an amputee experiences\u00a0a ghost limb.\u00a0If you were like me, and you remembered the same kind of jubilation and dancing on the streets ten years ago\u00a0in an unnamed Islamic country — a celebration (real or not) of the downing of the World Trade Center in New York — you probably experienced true visceral recoil watching those celebrations in New York and Washington. We see\u00a0into\u00a0the young faces of\u00a0those celebrants\u00a0caught in a screen shot by Eric posted above. The dancing in the streets and the waving of flags to some of those young people meant that the\u00a0boogeyman Usama bin Laden — a real Freddie Kruger\u00a0from a real\u00a0“Nightmare on Elm Street” —\u00a0was finally no more. It looked unconscious to me. College students\u00a0partying for the purpose of blowing off steam from finals.<\/p>\n

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The young people celebrating\u00a0could not have been more than ten years old at the time the Twin Towers fell. From children’s eyes, September 11, 2001 meant losing\u00a0the perception of a safe and secure world. They were, at the time, not schooled in the history of the 1960s, nor the hard-fought struggles against political hegemons like Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or for that matter George Bush I, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.\u00a0In those faces, you recognize\u00a0the\u00a0children they were and\u00a0the parables their parents used to caricature and characterize an enemy, a national wound, and a disaster that told all Americans that their isolated\u00a0empire was no longer sacrosanct.<\/p>\n

There has been more than too much water under that bridge we\u00a0crossed after September 11, 2001. Tora Bora.\u00a0WMDs. the Iraq invasion. Shock and Awe.\u00a0Six thousand US casualties and thousands more from the international coalition of US allies, and the hundreds of\u00a0thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The Patriot Act. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. Extraordinary rendition. The signing away of Habeus Corpus. That odd feeling in the pit of our stomachs tells us something: we have to know, now that the boogeyman is gone, what we have really lost.\u00a0We need to take time\u00a0to soak\u00a0in what became of us over the last ten years.\u00a0We were lied to. We placed ourselves\u00a0in a position where we could not do anything but be victimized by savior-redeemers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When we did we were belittled as unpatriotic cowards. Libtards. Traitors.<\/p>\n

Outside of a few well-connected and profitable ventures stemming from military involvement\u00a0in the Iraq War, everyone else paid the price for exacting revenge upon\u00a0‘the other’ — he who\u00a0exacted his own form of justice\u00a0against the Western empire, which in turn at once coddled and betrayed him. That includes to this day\u00a0steadfast Americans victimized because they practiced his same faith. Now we look at the mirror of who we were and we see ourselves as another monster, our own nightmare, only this time\u00a0on Main Street — \u00a0reflected back. We are divided from each other by that looking glass.<\/p>\n

It is no wonder then that we do recoil at the site of a ‘post-bin Laden’ celebration, and maybe rightfully, feel sick to our stomachs. What is this party really\u00a0for? The children we saw partying may have unconsciously been reared under a lie. Yet we can’t really judge the revelers of May 1st, 2011. That I think, only furthers the divide between us and what we see in the mirror, and to do so would not honor all that was lost over the last ten years, not the least of which was our humanity.<\/p>\n

I cannot offer any specific advice on how we can or should deal with a ‘post-bin Laden’ world. It still is and has always been a dangerous place. No one monster’s death can end that. But maybe as the wounded, we could begin healing ourselves of having been victimized by lies\u00a0through helping others through their own post-9-11 trauma, including the very children you see in Eric’s screen shot. The wound to their innocence still has a chance of being healed. They have a chance to learn where\u00a0monsters —\u00a0our dark sides — come from\u00a0if we’re willing to teach them.<\/p>\n

As learned from other nations who have coped with living during wartime, if anything is to come from truly defeating an enemy it must include the opportunity for our children and children everywhere to celebrate and enjoy the world, its people and its wonders with a sense of wise innocence.\u00a0The responsibility falls on us then,\u00a0as the guardians who have been around the fog of war\u00a0too many times, to stay alert and\u00a0put emphasis on the “wise.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You and I felt it Sunday night.\u00a0 For that split second in time, when the cool voice of President Obama pronounced those words, we found ourselves in a profound moment of disbelief. Usama bin Laden — dead. Staying up late, we watched the streets of Times Square in New York and in front of the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}