Can I say I kind of HATE when people say that 9/11 united all Americans?
4si4:
Because that’s total bullshit. I know people who were suddenly seen as the furthest thing from an American after those attacks.
Nothing good came from those attacks. Nothing.
Why replace one etiquette of political speech with another? Of course 9/11 did not unite “all Americans.” But it’s also ridiculous to say “nothing good came from those attacks.” In reality, and predictably, there are quantifiable increases in certain acts of compassion immediately after disasters including after the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks also had deeper and more complicated positive effects (alongside very many negative effects) as noted by Noam Chomsky a year later and numerous times more recently:
9/11 had a complex effect on the US which I don’t think is appreciated abroad. The picture abroad is that it turned everyone into a raving jingoist and that is absolutely not true. It opened people’s minds. This is a very insular society. People in the US don’t know anything about the outside world. They may not know where France is, literally. It’s a huge country, everything has been focused internally. 9/11 made a lot of people think: ‘We’d better figure out what is going on in the world. We’d better figure out what our role is and why things like that are happening. And the result was a huge increase in interest and concern. Huge audiences. I spend probably an hour a night just turning down requests for interviews from all over the place. They’re not necessarily agreeing but they’re thinking about what is going on. … I was just reading a very interesting review of a book that is coming out on the post-9/11 world and it says that in the US everyone sort of collapsed and turned into a flag-waving maniac. That’s just complete nonsense. Small publishers have been reprinting texts they haven’t released since the 1970s. It had a very complex effect. [link]When I said “nothing good” I was thinking more along the lines of nothing worth it. I can see that some things changed for the better, but to me that’s kind of like a woman saying, “Me and my husband’s marriage was strengthened after our daughter was brutally murdered.”
Right. It’s an etiquette issue, which might be nice in some social contexts and repressive in others. In the U.S., a lot of political speech amounts to nothing more than etiquette issues. That’s a problem. If you think about it the people who say “9/11 united all Americans” are also just observing some kind of etiquette and probably don’t mean exactly what they say any more than you do.
(Source: alternative-junkie, via alternative-junkie)
