What am I thinking about on this day of 9/11/11 the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11/01?
Well, I'm thinking of the fact that we (as in humanity but probably mostly Western societies) are heading towards self-destruction on a number of different levels and we're mostly occupied with pretending not to realise and ignoring these realities.
On a global-political level we are heading towards the next big superpower conflict or at least an increased level of bloody proxy wars because the global balance of power is rapidly changing and the main participants in the Great Game are behaving like England and Germany in the early 19th century.
Environmentally a small part of humankind is pulling away the rug of livelihood from under the feet of everybody and only realising at a snail's pace that it might be affected too at some point.
Economically we keep on finding new ingenious ways to exploit each other and ourselves for our money and our effort.
Socially we keep ever increasing the number of dividing lines between us, fighting endless shadow-wars with imagined enemies projected onto the wall by our own media.
The worst part of it is however that we are hardly recognising what is going on but instead occupy ourselves with distractions, projections and 'shadow' problems like the local conflicts, the "clash of civilisations" or "immigration".
Especially on this tragic day of 9/11, can we please stop wallowing in self-indulgence and defending the current state of Western societies as any kind of ideal but use the momentum of shock and grief to reflect on how we should seek to attain something better? Just think about this - how can it be that only after the horrific event of the 9/11 attacks did Americans witness a momentary "coming together", a growth of social trust, as Tina Brown claimed in a recent BBC interview? How 'good' is this society really?
I mean come on, it's a main-stay statement that capitalism isn't the best system there is but it's the least bad system we've been able to create. Despite all the wealth it creates for a few that manage to ride the dragon it also constantly generates major problems and costs. It constantly destroys its own social base by always seeking new ways to accumulate capital. We have just witnessed the collapse of the latest of these capital-accumulating schemes in the form of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and all the lasting damage this continues to cause to millions of lives. Until we can come up with a better system, capitalism needs to be checked, it needs to be balanced out, forced to invest a guaranteed share of its generated profits into healing the cultural and social wounds it constantly inflicts, just to keep it from destroying our societies. A healthy distrust of this machine is in order not an ever-closer embrace of the economy with every other aspect of our lives and that of the planet as is currently being promoted as the solution in the face of governments' fiscal impotence caused by bailing out system-critical banks.
The modern world we created for ourselves to live and work in is extremely taxing and not an ideal one for any of us to live in. As mentioned above - the fact that it took a massive terrorist attack as 9/11 to bring people in New York and America to trust and help each other more shows that we haven't arrived in any kind of 'good' society.
What is preventing us from admitting this to ourselves then and discussing it on this very day? Maybe we are already too invested in the status quo, too hopeful that we will be amongst the select few to make it to an acceptable level of comfort at the expense of all those who don't. Is that why we so anxiously cling to the wreckage of this society and won't even mention our own discomfort with the way things are even when they go so horribly wrong? But for how many is that hope actually going to come true?
And even if it was to come true what does that hoped for privilege of an "acceptable level of comfort" look like? Is it to work our asses off for living in our own house where we can then hate the neighbours, worry about the house-price declining, own two cars that sweeten the way to the hated workplace, have fancy kitchen appliances that beep and break at an accelerating rate, and get so estranged from our partner that we divorce them we're 45 and require counselling for the rest of our lifetime. Sounds like a bum deal to me.
Unless we use today to think about how we can honour the dead by promising to keep trying to make our world a better place for everybody I think we shame their memory.
