from the vault
I wrote the following essay ten years ago, when I was 14 years old. The subject was the most memorable event of September that year. In October 2001, it was published in a short-lived creative writing magazine at school.
I’ve reproduced this as it appeared then (errors and all) as a document of how I felt at the time. It is a curiosity and nothing more. The only thing I can remember about writing it was working through the first proof with a very patient teacher who was quietly insistent that I tone down the rhetoric.
Reading it now, I am not proud; I feel an odd mixture of fascination and embarrassment. Consider a great big (sic) hovering over the whole thing. It’s not that I no longer agree with the opinions of my younger self, nor that I’m totally repelled by my own reliance on cliche and swaggering style, but the whole thing now seems to me emblematic of the kind of thing I no longer wish to write. It has nothing at all new to offer the reader. It is my own naive opinion, devoid of empathy or fresh understanding. It is editorialising without consequence.
11/9/01: THE DAY AMERICA COLLAPSED
The main events of the last few weeks have been somewhat difficult for me to comprehend in their magnitude. This is easily the biggest event that any of my generation has ever seen so far, bigger even than the events in Iraq, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. The whole sanctity of the civilised world has been threatened in the last few weeks; these attacks have proved that nobody is safe, and that terrorism isn’t just something that happens to other people. The twin towers of the WTC weren’t just office blocks: they were two of the tallest buildings in the world, the very columns of capitalism, symbols of western wealth, globalisation and pure profit. It’s difficult for any of us not to feel afraid after seeing the mountains of rubble on the television or in the newsprint, even if we didn’t lose anyone in the disaster, and it’s hard to see how this couldn’t have happened elsewhere, such as Canary Wharf. It seems to have brought the world back to a ‘Cold War’ frame of mind, with all this fighting talk.
The most important thing, however, seems to be that it happened in America. America! The ‘land of the free’! The ‘good guys’! How could this have happened, I hear you cry? Well, for one thing, I’m hardly surprised. It’s their own fault, in a sense. America should realise that a change in their foreign policy is necessary to avoid events like this happening again. They simply cannot interfere in the lives of people millions of miles away and expect to have nothing thrown back in their faces. Take the bombing of Kosovo, for example: not one American life was taken during that campaign, or even the contempt shown towards the Middle East in general.
The media’s reaction to this event has been, in my opinion, obscene and overblown: a feeding frenzy to get the latest scoop. The world has picked this up, of course, and the floodgates have been opened for all the star-studded money raising events, and the huge services all around the world dedicated to the thousands that died. It was a terrible loss, of course, but what about the tens of thousands that die from malnutrition, war and disease every day in Africa? What about the four people who die from gun crime every hour…in America? What about the damage done to innocents in the war with Iraq? What is it about these people that took away their right to be remembered by the world? They were nobodies; the people that died in the ruins of the WTC have become heroes, patriots, martyrs, whatever you will call them.
All this black confetti of mourning has brought the whole western world back together, perhaps closer than ever before, in our little ‘war’ against terrorism. It’s a natural human reaction, of course, to draw ourselves closer together in times of trouble, and it’s also a natural reaction to finger the blame. The known terrorist Osama Bin Laden is the one this time, and has managed to keep a very low profile while the West begin to mobilise their immense armies. Whether it was him or not, we do know that he was responsible for several other terrorist acts in the past, and catching him would certainly be a step forward in this ‘war’.
The main problem that I can see in the foreseeable future is actually catching the people involved. If sending in troops solved terrorism, then organisations like the IRA would have died out long ago. Afghanistan is a very arid, mountainous country, with many places in the wilderness to hide a man like Bin Laden. At the moment, even the Taliban government are finding it difficult to say where he is.
Starting a war will not solve anything, and I can guarantee that afterwards the problem will still be there. If America starts a war now, they will inspire a new generations of extremists, criminals, and terrorists from the ashes of the old, and they will only intensify the anti-American feeling. How can they possibly expect to destroy an ideology with an army? It is an invisible, formless enemy that we must fight against, and not necessarily with guns and rockets. Terrorism is a problem old as mankind, and it will always be there. Besides, isn’t there something a little bit unfair about several of the richest countries grouping together to attack the world’s third poorest country? Having George Bush as the leader of the most powerful country in the world does not make me feel any better either; we might as well have Britney Spears instead. Without a pre-written speech, the man is clearly out of his depth. It’s true, however, there seems to be little viable alternative at the moment: the whole world is crying out for blood, for someone to take the blame for this atrocity, be they innocent or guilty. I doubt very much whether it will matter to the mob whether they did it or not, at least it will make us all sleep easier at night.
Some of us (the minority, unfortunately) want for the exact opposite of all this. Do we really want another war? Will our grandchildren look back on us in many years time and think ‘Wow, it was really worth all those people dying, wasn’t it?’ It is America’s foreign policies and the way they deal and negotiate with other countries that needs to change. Did they not consider just WHY this happened in the first place, or did they just assume: ‘It was their fault, let’s go hit them back!’.
In conclusion, it is true, unfortunately, that hundreds of thousands of people die every day, both in warlike events like these, and in famine and disease. I find it somewhat sickening that the people who died at the WTC are mourned by the world simply because they had mattered more in terms of money than those in the third world did. Of course, I do not wish to offend the memory of those who died at the WTC, but it is clearly unfair that they should be entitled to more remembrance than those who die on a daily basis. Finally, my only wish is that we should calm down, and look for an alternative to violence against the Middle East.
