This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Jan 2009, by Zee ----------.
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19 Jan 09
Zee ----------But here in LA, something equally bizarre was happening – or my eyes were being opened to it for the very first time – and it was almost as difficult to comprehend as the devastation. Literally within hours of the attack, an old school chum, now also living in LA, forwarded me a mass email from MoveOn.org – urging people not to give in to their feelings of fear and anger (normal in a grieving process), but to ask why this violence had been directed at us and to take a hard look at what we had done to inspire such an act.
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, he would often tell me proudly about the sensitivity training the NYPD was undergoing - even despite the fact that the department had been informed of hundreds of sleeper cells spread all over the NY/NJ area.
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I tried to process this line of thinking, but it was so soon after the attack, it only added to my guilt, confusion and anger. Meanwhile, the MoveOn.org emails kept being forwarded to me everyday, with similar messages. It began to seem like MoveOn.org did not want ordinary people like myself to go through a full grieving process – which would include, at the very least, a period of anger (denial), and then sadness. There seemed to be a mass effort afoot to undermine peoples’ natural human reaction to 9/11 – to take away the power of their emotions, and try to replace those emotions with correct thinking ASAP. (In retrospect, someone must have been very afraid of those emotions.)
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In early November 2001, I was at another friend’s house one evening, watching the NBC Nightly News. During a commercial break, the words HAPPY RAMADAN suddenly flashed on the screen, then vanished. I wasn’t sure what I had just seen – or if I had really seen it at all. It was so fast, subliminal. My friend wasn’t sure he had really seen it either. We looked at each other, perplexed. On top of that, I couldn’t recall any network ever celebrating Ramadan before – I barely even knew what Ramadan was. Yet right after mass devastation in my home town, suddenly there it was on the screen. HAPPY RAMADAN - blink and you missed it. We saw the words flash one more time after that, then no more.
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there was comfort in it. It was familiar
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I began to realize that I did not really believe in the knee-jerk attitudes I had affected for most of my life, in New York.
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and mentioning the crusades, which made me feel vaguely guilty as if, again, somehow we had brought this on ourselves. (Last time I checked, the United States did not exist in 1096.)
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I didn’t even know that Israel is a democracy, a pluralistic society like we are, and I had no concept of how rare that is in the world, particularly in the Middle East. I took democracy completely for granted. Like many Americans, I assumed the whole world was coming from the same place, wanted the same things – with a few bad apples here and there.
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that old, perverted German ideology known as Nazism, which we all agree is a bad thing, has never gone out of style – it just moved mid-east. I’m not sure many Americans realize how big a part Swastikas and Nazi salutations play in the radical Islamic world.
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But re-reading it after several years, I was shocked at my own snideness. Peppered throughout the entire book were snotty asides and insinuations about American hypocrisy, aspersions about how conformist and rigid our society was, how evil Republicans were, the whole shebang. And I realized something awful: I had just been parroting what I was taught all my life from watching television – which was where I got most of my notions about the world while I was growing up.
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But really, what did I have to complain about? Who had forced me to conform to any harsh societal standard?
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