September 11th in Perspective

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Yes, there are plenty of events you can attend today and tonight.
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But we must do something first.
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If you are very young, ask someone about the significance of September 11th.
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If you are very old, share with others how hearing the words "December 7th" and "September 11th" produce similar and unique memories of horror and feelings of resolve and compassion for those struck down, and for their families who were suddenly left without them.
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In 2001, the century and the millenia were both brand new. All the hopes and dreams of the future were supposed to be here, being fulfilled, bringing a Star Trek promise for all of us. It was supposed to be a new and bright future that transcended the ugliness of the past, a time when we could symbolically cast-off the primal and brutal traits that had characterized so much of human history. We had learned to take care of our fragile planet. We had learned to overcome prejudices and bigotry.
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But instead of being spacefarers, we find ourselves living in a 21st century that is nothing like the future we once imagined. We dawdle over decaying vital infrastructure. We watch polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise while we burn oil and enrich profiteers. We are mired in debt, stuck in Afghanistan, and hearing politicians call for more spending for the military, more intervention in foreign lands, more costly foreign wars that we are supposed to accept as necessary and otherwise ignore.
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Instead of living in that 21st century we dreamed of, we live with the legacy of September 11th. With us still are the most primitive compulsions of humanity, the scarred-over, but still painful wounds. We still feel the legacy of the most diabolical and conniving and cynical and murderous impulses, and with them, that single day that changed everything.
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Religion is supposed to inspire us to fulfill our highest aspirations and to simply take care of each other. But it is still exploited, misused in the most disgraceful obscenity, as the reason to kill each other. How anyone can believe that a supreme, penultimate cosmic entity that cares about us could desire any of us to do that is a mystery no religion can answer.
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Our educational system is supposed to impart sufficient understanding of science that we will not be led like baying cattle to a lot of stupid and impossible conspiracy-theorist beliefs. Yet, on the anniversary of that tragic day, the web is again buzzing with crazy "truths" about "what REALLY happened."
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Despite our infatuations with infestations of narcissistic technology that separates us from one another at least as much as it brings us together, perhaps we are not yet very sophisticated. Instead of getting to know and care about one another as people with individual characteristics and dreams and aspirations and reasons to laugh and to cry - really knowing each other in interpersonal, give and take relationships - we instead toot and tweet and post and blast and reveal things in public forums that are inappropriate to share with others to whom we are not close.
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We "build" web "communities" that exist apart from any human contact or concern for anyone as a unique individual. We share public spaces and conveyances while individually encapsulated in our ear buds, staring in intent and total immersion at our glowing miniature screens, shutting-outother people, and even basic awareness of our surroundings, because we have somehow determined that we want to.
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What a pity and a loss and a shame. Would someone who has left us choose to do that, if she or he could have one day, one hour, one minute back among us?
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Instead of going to the stars - or at least to the planets and their ice-skinned oceanic moons - all our money was wasted, one more time, on wars and greedy bankers and clever and ruthless manipulators. We have not saved ourselves from melting icecaps and rising oceans and changes in the balance of atmospheric gasses that are baking crop lands and bringing wildly destructive weather. We have not rejected oil as fuel and aggressively developed sustainable and nonpolluting energy for our future or our pressing present need.
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We could have learned. We should have, from any of the many tragedies that came before. We should have, from the ongoing exploitation of our labors and the earth's natural bounties for the enrichment of the exploiters at the expense of us all. Instead, our precious human and natural and economic resources have disappeared into the bottomless abyss of war and the endless "need" of millionaire money-grabbers, and here we are.
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As long as we remain addicted to oil, we will fight wars to protect "our" oil supplies. As long as we allow the super-rich to buy the levers of government power to preserve their profitable status quo, we empower those in the world who resent us, and we risk another September 11th.
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Even more families will never see their loved ones come home, and why? Not because our knowledge has been increased, or our understanding enhanced, or our drive for exploration and discovery fulfilled, or our ability to feed and provide opportunities, at last, for all. We are, instead, trying to avoid paying crushing bills for pursuing our primitive impulses while allowing the wealthiest among us to enrich themselves even more. That is deplorable, whether we see it as a lesson not learned from September 11th, or apply it as we should, to the way we live.
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During the Bush administration, September 11th was proclaimed the annual "Patriots Day." It is marked that way on all the printed-in-China calendars hanging on our walls. That proclamation somehow feels and seems a gross oversimplification, to the point of a dismissal of all the emotions and thoughts and memories and resolve and reflection, of all the empty chairs at all the dinner tables, of all the lost possibilities and deferred dreams, of all the exploitation and squandered opportunities that still accompany the somber anniversary of this awful day in 2001. In so many ways, that tragedy is still with us and continues to multiply.
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"How many times will the cannonballs fly, until they are forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind." - Bob Dylan
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The current complete edition of the Acoustic Americana Music Guide's "Spotlight Events" section, from September 6, has our most up-to-date events.
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