It is hard to believe that 2001 did not, in fact, start on Sept. 11. The horrors of that day appear to have blotted out every piece of news that preceded it . Though he has played such an important part in the subsequent events, George W. Bush’s becoming the 43rd president of the United States by the thickness of a Florida ballot paper is no longer memorable.
Gone too, at least for those who were not its victims, is any clear memory of the Gujarat earthquake, whose 7.9 Richter-scale convulsions slew over 30,000 Indians and left over a million homeless. Do many of us remember that Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted dangerously or that the British had to slaughter more than four million farm animals to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease? And other pieces of international news that perhaps moved us deeply at the time now seem remote, such as the death of 12-year-old AIDS victim Nkosi Johnson, whose brave address to a South African AIDS conference did so much to pinpoint his country’s failure to treat its sufferers with dignity and compassion. Even the good news, such as the unexpected deportation of Slobodan Milosevic from Yugoslavia and his arraignment before the the Hague tribunal seems, for the moment, without signifcance.
Sept. 11 blotted out all time before it in enduring thick clouds of dust that hung in a great pall in our memories. But only nine months before, the new year and the new millennium had begun with such hopes and such celebrations. Though economists were warning that the long boom was coming to an end and we were due to start the downward turn of a recessionary cycle, we also had the cyclical optimism that this downturn would not be too severe or too enduring.
How wrong we were! After Sept.11, an estimated 18 million jobs have disappeared in the 30 leading nations alone. Within nine weeks of the event, two national airlines, Sabena and Swiss Air, collapsed and corporations, great and small around the world, were shedding staff and capacity as they hunkered down for hard times ahead. As the new year begins, we see the US-led campaign in Afghanistan coming to an apparently successful end. Afghanistan itself is embarked shakily upon what most of its citizens hope will be a peaceful and united future. Against this good news, we must remember that the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament has brought Pakistan and India to the very brink of war.
No one could have imagined twelve months ago what a vast change would overtake the world. We should realize that rarely, if ever, has the world felt so united in the face of a single awful event as Sept. 11. We should value that feeling of togetherness and common cause. We all wept with America.
As they face the new year, with far less certainty than they did the last, Americans should be realizing that their economic and military domination of the globe cannot allow them to them live in isolation. Terrible injustices have been done far beyond their borders, by successive US governments, in their name. Those deeds sowed the seeds for the brutal fanaticism which led to Sept. 11. Nothing can excuse those terrible events. However, US citizens need to try and understand why anyone could ever consider them even remotely justified.
