Now that the yearly fervour has died down, and the crowds have gone home, and there is no Bush in the White House, I feel that I can finally sit down and have a personal moment to reflect on 9/11.

Up until this moment, it was simply not possible. As I lamented in years past, my deep emotions on the subject were co-opted by morally corrupt politicians. So, I had to stash away the intense feelings I have on the subject until this day, the political spring of the United States of America.

What is there to say that has not been said with a heaping scoop of melodramatic sentimentality? Or inhuman cynicism? Not much, but that is also the point of this whole manifesto. There is no balance. You either have the liberal hippies who I hang out with who scoff at the very idea of being emotionally affected by 9/11, or the Conservative douchebags for whom it was the defining moment of their existence and from which there can be no forgiveness or forgetfulness.

On the morning of Tuesday September 11, 2001, my mother woke me abruptly to say that some disaster was going down in New York. I swept away the fog in my brain so that I could go to the living room where the news was continuously flowing from the television. As I sat, I learned that both towers had been hit by commercial airliners, and that one of the towers had already collapsed. I was fully briefed just in time to watch the second tower collapse, live, right before my eyes.

The news commentator in the background just stopped talking, only to utter, "Oh my God..." Several second passed before he had the wits to realize that millions were listening to him.

This moment will be branded into my mind forever. Me, watching live, as thousands of people were burned, crushed, suffocated; dying right before my eyes. People who had not signed up to fight a war, or ever hurt anyone, nor killed anyone. They had just gone to work, left their wives or husbands or mothers or fathers or children at home to go to their boring jobs. Murdered, just to show someone's contempt for the United Sates of America. And me, powerless to do anything.

I cried.

Things moved a lot more quickly from there. People wanted justice, people wanted revenge. We went along for a while. Eventually (probably around the time they decided to go into Iraq again) we found that our emotions were being exploited so that we were essentially puppets. So I stopped feeling anything about 9/11 except for contempt at the ones who had exploited the emotions of the people to wage war.

Eventually, people in America started to realize the same thing. It took the deaths of a lot of their wives or husbands or mothers or fathers or children fighting in Iraq to do it. They gave Bush the cold shoulder and he became a lame duck. And they elected a super-cool interracial president with fresh ideas.

That brings us to about now.

So with all of this under our belts, what have we learned?

Nothing.

I've spent the past several years suppressing my feelings about that tragic day to spite the conservatives who try to use tragedy to manipulate us to their ends. But now, allow me to finally take aim at my pompous fellow liberals for their lack of empathy.

"America Deserved It"
What? OH, I see, you didn't really mean "deserved it". What you meant to say is that it is not surprising that this happened, considering how America has interfered with the Middle East in the past, and have had shitty foreign policy in general for the whole of the 20th century.

Which is, of course, true. But this is something that came up every time I wanted to discuss how 9/11 made me feel, which was not an invitation to discuss the international politics which led to the situation.

An attack on the White House or a military installation I could understand, but people going to their dead-end jobs have very little to do with America's foreign policy of the entire 20th century, much of which happened before they were even old enough to vote.

I certainly hope I never have to rely on you if I am kidnapped by Aboriginal-Canadian terrorists intent on redressing the destruction of their culture, because in your minds I most certainly will also "deserve it".

"This Was an Attack on America, Not on Us"
This is a kind of a kick in the face to all the non-Americans were affected by this tragedy. Besides the numerous non-Americans who lost American friends and relatives, 329 foreign nationals were killed in the 9/11 attacks. So more than one in ten people killed in the attack on America were not actually Americans. By the way that figure excludes the hijackers, and includes two people from Jordan, and three from Lebanon. Shitty deal, huh?

"Our Emotions About 9/11 are Selfish and Irrelevant, When You Consider How Many People Die in *insert third-world regional conflict here*"
This is my absolute favourite, because it invariably involves some numbers comparison. Then follows the accusation that I care more about English-speaking suburbanites than I care about brown people in another country.

Well, if you want to make absolute value judgements... yeah, I guess I do.

Which is not to say that I do not care for all the peoples of our beautiful planet, but rather that I feel closeness based on distance and cultural similarities. I care more about a tragedy in New York City than a tragedy in Spain. I would care more about one in Montreal than the one in New York. More about one in Vancouver than one in Montreal. And I care most about tragedy that happens to personal friends or family. Degrees of separation affect how I feel grief. Regrettably, I am not able to dole out my grief or care or love to every person on Earth equally, that would not be Human.

Let me also say what an absolutely tasteless argument this is. Could you imagine going to someone's funeral, only to go to the podium to say, "Well Frank, it's really tragic that your wife died of cancer, but just be glad you're not that guy I know whose whole family was killed in a car crash last year. Just think about how awful that would be. So yeah, suck it up." No, making comparisons in such emotional situations is never tasteful.

 
At the end of the day, tragedy is not a numbers game. People don't need to die. If someone burned the Mona Lisa tomorrow, that would be a tragedy for all Humanity. When the last passenger pigeon dies, it's a tragedy. A tragedy is something you feel. And for the last eight years people have been telling me that I should either be feeling about something else or not at all.

Well, after years of not feeling anything, I am finally free to feel something without being accused of political dogmatism. And nobody can tell me what or how to feel.

So here goes...

 
 
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Okay, done now.