We feel for the people in the towers, we agree with almost any measure to sop it ever happening again, and so we should. But for the thirty-four thousand, each day? Given our behaviour and despite the idea we're supposed to love our children, you could be forgiven for thinking that most of us just don't give a damn."
Iain Banks: Dead Air
I walked home, vaguely and uneasily aware that my Uncle Jim worked in New York, but thought "hey, it's a big city, chances are he works somewhere else," only to be told by my mother when I returned that no, his office was on the 102nd floor of one of the towers. It was six painful hours later, after continuous TV replays of the collapses into those grey deadlocks of smoke and ash, after the jammed phone lines to America had found some extra capacity that we learnt that Jim's office was in the second tower to be hit, had been due to be in the office that day, but had gone to Connecticut to do a presenatation after one of his juniors had refused to do it. Had he been in the office that day, would he have started the descent and got out in time? Two hundred of his colleagues did not, and dwelling on this point for too long achieves nothing.
I wrote the paragraph above, and use the prefacing quotation to contextualise what follows: like hundreds of thousands I felt I had personal links to the events on that day: Jim's girlfriend was in the subway station under the towers when the first airliner struck, my cousin had to run away to escape the clouds. Whilst I accept that many of the bereaved may feel differently, my central view, shared by millions of others is that the day that has been described as changing everything, has in fact left everything pretty much the same.
I often struggle with the thought that I do not believe that senior members of the United States administration actually think that its current foreign policy is going to stop acts of terror by non-state groups. It is perhaps best not to conjecture what is really going on in the presidential mind, but anyone with a modicum of sense can appreciate that terrorist groups are hydra-headed; they are a result, no matter how unintentional, of the societies from which they emanate, be they global, local, or an interplay of the two.
It seems equally apparent to many that the invading of Iraq by the so-called "coalition of the willing" will achieve very little, and has indeed made matters in many ways worse. Bush was able to muddy enough American minds linking terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam-the-monster and bad guy post-Kuwait to effectively bypass the United Nations to depose him and open up Iraq for American big-business interests, and err, oil.
There is so much that is a matter for record that makes 2003 a particularly depressing year. Saddam was able to gas the Kurds at Halabja, run a despotic internal regime, use chemical weapons in his war against Iran, and yet, until his fatal miscalculation in 1990 was seen as a friend of the West, which was equally eager to sell it all manner of military equipment. All the evidence that now exists points to a conclusion that Iraq's biological and chemical weapons were destroyed before the 2003 war- Iraq was being asked to prove the unprovable. I will never shed a tear over Saddam's downfall, but history in the end would have got him, and I hope it would have been a matter for the Iraqi people themselves to determine. In time, of course, a "free and democratic" chaotic Iraq may well give way to a suitably malleable dictatorship by a complete bastard that the United States (and to be fair, much of the West) prefers to see in that part of the world.
All of which brings me to Ariel Sharon. The Palestinians still do not have a viable state, and it seems obvious that building a stable political Palestinian governance, society and economy is going to take a whole lot of political will and money that the United States could help provide if it had the nous to do so. And yes, the Israeli settlements in Gaza and on the West Bank have just got to go...
I do appear to be ranting once again. I think that was the original purpose of the monthly messages to the planet, before I allowed myself to become gleefully distracted by the ephemeral and the ease of scanning photographs of friends, family and pink furry aliens onto the site. Deep down I know that the world is a fundamentally unfair place; that of the very little there is in my power to do about changing it, I will do even less; that my own relative economic well-being has been brought about by a western society that has been able to pull up the drawbridge from the rest of humanity; that I know that personal sacrifice would be required in a re-ordered global society.
It's a startling image though. Two thousand eight hundred thousand children falling to their deaths in a skyscraper, once an hour, every hour. Perhaps, once in a while we should dwell on it.
