"Patriot Day"

Five years later, I still lack an adequate vocabulary to describe my feelings about what I witnessed, live on television, on the morning of Sept. 11. Heart-breaking horror, for example, doesn't come close. In the realm of human experience, I've never found justification for mass murder, which is what happened that day.

But in all this endless media coverage about what transpired five years ago today and what has occured in the intervening years -- a justifiable war in Afghanistan, an idiotic one in Iraq, making a mockery of "American values" in the eyes of the world and the erosion of our civil liberties for a false sense of security -- I still notice a valuable question is not being asked.

On "Patriot Day," I'm going to ask the "unpatriotic" question: How has this country been complicit in creating the geopolitical climate that gave birth to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism? Although I'm not suggesting we "deserved" what happened on Sept. 11, why has our social and political discourse not examined the American foreign policy and corporate influence on the world stage that made us a target?

Why do we always look outward but so rarely look inward?

Almost exclusively, the conversations in the media about "what happened" on Sept. 11 stick to discussion of what went wrong with the FAA or with airport security, with immigration procedures and federal agencies that didn't talk to each other. Or they have focused on the emotional aspects: the horror of watching the planes hit the buildings, the people jumping, the efforts of Flight 93's passengers to stop the fourth hijacking, all those firefighters who died. There was even an hour-long program in which the air traffic controllers repeated their experience of watching the little blips of aircraft move across the radar screens until disappearing.

In one of those programs, I heard a member of the Bush Administration talk about the "values we are advancing" and how the "terrorists" are against our values. His comment was never explored, but I think it really gets to the crux of the matter.

I give no kudos to people who commit acts of terrorism. I don't care if it's the Irish Republican Army bombing a bus in London, Timothy McVeigh blowing up a building in Oklahoma City or some cult group popping sarin gas balloons in a Tokyo subway. But it's absurd to ignore the fact that all those people are acted out against social or governemental realities with which they had some kind of conflict.

Islamic fundamentalists, as well as many liberal practitioners of Islam, have different values than what is being promoted -- and "advanced around the world" -- by the United States of America and other western societies. As a woman, a feminist, an atheist and a whole host of other things opposed by Islam, I personally do not support their cause.

But I also don't think that the United States has much business "advancing" its values -- Chrisitianity, capitalism and crass commercialism (what curious bedfellows they are!) -- in other societies. We show no respect for other cultures; we want them to be all-American, all the time. We think our way of life, our customs and our laws are the best, and that everyone else ought to be like us and live like us. Or at least allow us to conduct our business in their countries as we see fit, not to mention sucking up their natural resources with as little compensation as possible.

From taking the oil out of Nigeria at great ecological costs and with no compensation to the people -- anyone remember Ken Saro-Wiwa? -- to the U.S. government's insistent pressure on South Korea that the country eliminate the requirement that its movie theaters show South Korean films at least 106 days a year, we are always pushing our big fat American bellies around, looking for a little more to grub-grub and fatten the coffers of our corporations.

It doesn't settle well with me and my values to see women being forced to wear burkhas under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Nor does it settle well with me to see gay men in Egypt rounded up, harrassed and beaten by police. Nor to see women in this country being denied access to an abortion.

Even in this great United States, we don't share the same values uniformly. Alaska and Alabama can be at serious odds. So why on earth should we expect that what's being exported as "American values" will be embraced on other continents, by people who have radically different world views than is being "advanced" by our government's foreign policy and our corporations?

The Islamic fundamentalists who turn to terrorism should never be appeased. But Islamic societies, in and of themselves, should have a right to coexist on this planet and a right not to have American business and American culture shoved down their throats. Just as we were angered -- and rightfully fought back against Al Queda in Afghanistan -- when Islamic jihadists brought their campaign to our soil, so America has a tendancy to anger those who do not want our way of life overrunning theirs (in ways that sometimes seem just as outrageous to those cultures as what happened on Sept. 11).

This is far too complicated a issue for me to tackle in one blog and not something I want to make a habit of writing about, not in the least. But I did just want to weigh in, here on "Patriot Day," by suggesting that the most patriotic thing we might do in the NEXT FIVE YEARS is to reconsider our "war on terror" and take a closer look at what we're putting out into the world.

I've often heard it said that what we put out into the world, the world will give back to us. So that begs the question: Just what was it that came home to roost on Sept. 11?