I wonder if people can see the good that came out of the events of 9/11/2001.

I look back and the stories of how FDR set up American to be attacked at Pearl Harbor just to get Americans out their isolationistic and narrow-minded ideology. In the 1930’s America was suffering from and still coming out of the depression and we did not care about anybody else but America and Americans (does this sound familiar?). In order to get people to open their minds and notice the suffering of other people in the world, FDR orchestrated or allowed (as the story goes) the events that lead up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With that event we quickly woke up to the situation that was developing in East Asia at the hands of the Japanese and the tyranny that was taking place in Europe at the same time. Without Pearl Harbor we might have taken several more years to wake up and by then it might have been too late to overcome the Japanese and German domination. Pearl Harbor was necessary because we Americans were not caring about anybody but ourselves.

Then look at the world situation before 9/11/2001. The Islamic world was mostly living in utter poverty. Even though the Saudis where making lots of money they were not sharing it with the common people who are among the poorest in the world. Afghanistan was probably one of the most backward countries in the world and the oppression of the people there, particularly the women, we as extreme or more extreme as under Hitler or Stalin. Repression and oppression was and still is rampant in most Islamic countries.

Yet who in America was taking notice?

The conservatives were of the mind set that we should not get involved in other people’s business. Remember the reaction of the Republicans to Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia? They did not care about those people in the former Yugoslavia. But after 9/11 they are all behind their Republican President to go save the world.

So what if (and only if) President Bush or some of his friends did orchestrate the attack on the World Trade Center? In the long run it was good for humanity and will be good for America. So what if a few thousand people die, if it is for the good of the larger whole of humanity.

Yes, some of those people were close to us here in America so we take it personally. People are dying all over the world all time and in larger quantities than what happened on 9/11. Think the Rwanda massacres in the 1990’s. How many died there and who really cared? Black people in Africa or the Middle East do not matter as much as white people in New York, right?

So America needed to get hit over the head with a two by four to get its attention, just like the proverbial jackass that we have become.

Of course, 9/11 was not the first warning we were given and we did not listen to it. Remember the FIRST attack on the World Trade Center in 1993? It was not enough to wake up America so we needed 9/11 to do the job.

It is nice to see that the women of Afghanistan are no longer required to live under the burkas. The internet is coming to Afghanistan and so is the enviable opening of their minds and culture. It will not happen over night but it is happening. 9/11 was the beginning of THEIR liberation. 9/11 was their Boston Tea Party in a way.

It is time that the civilized world recognizes the tyranny that people live under in extreme religious societies. We can not ignore people living on the other side of the world just because they live on the other side of the world. Religion has always been and will always be tyrannical and eventually we will ‘cure’ this planet of this cancer. But in the mean time we make war on those who are hurting the most under this tyranny without confronting the source of the disease.

It is a start and only a start.