Losing someone you love sucks mighty bad. I feel sorry for all loss going on everywhere in the world now and into the eternal future. Plus everything in the past. But just because someone you love died because of something doesn’t make you an expert in stopping that something.
Apparently, the 9/11 families still disagree:
After an emotional, private meeting at the White House with President Barack Obama , survivors and victims’ relatives of two al Qaida attacks said Friday that the president quelled some of their fears about closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention center, promised them an “open-door” policy and a hand in shaping anti-terror policies, and said he is considering a modified military commission system to try detainees.
I got in a car wreck once. Make me a city planner, dammit!
I make the cancer crack in the title, but, seriously, what’s the difference between believing I’m an expert in curing cancer and these people believing they need a say in how to “stop terror?” You’re about as likely to end all terrorism in your lifetime as you are to end cancer (maybe significantly less likely). Both things are complex and require a tremendous amount of education to fully understand in terms of cause and effect. Neither terrorism nor cancer seem to listen when people freak out over them, but both can ruin your life if you live in constant fear of them.
A person killing your family member may make you murderous with rage and the desire for revenge. That’s human nature. But last I checked, channeling those desires into policy never produces a constructive outcome. More often, it simply results in more terror in one’s homeland. And it usually results in exponentially more death somewhere else at the hands of your countrymen. Overall , then, millions more families eventually experience the same trauma you lived through when someone killed your loved one for reasons you didn’t understand.
That a person could walk into the president’s office and demand answers on closing Guantanamo just because they loved someone in a building or plane on 9/11 is so presumptuous, so ignorant, such a twisted way to cope with loss, that’s it’s damn near the platonic ideal of American behavior.
In a healthier parallel world, I could imagine Americans who lost loved ones via terrorism using their ample resources and time not to agitate for more war and terror-inspiring human rights violations, but instead to develop meaningful coping strategies — psychologically, physically, and possibly even spiritually. If anyone should be able to rise above the 100,000-of-your-eyes-for-one-of-mine mentality, these people should. And if they did, they’d be setting an example for others in places like Israel, showing that it’s possible to avoid the downward spiral of violence.
You can’t bring back the dead, but you can certainly advocate for fewer killings of innocents. If these families truly wanted others to avoid the pain they’ve suffered, they’d do something besides go on a media blitz saying shit like this:
“To me it’s beyond comprehension that they would take the side of the terrorists,” said Peter Gadiel, whose son, James, was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
So, yeah. I’m calling out the specific people who lost someone on 9/11 and are now trumpeting hate-speech, demanding more human rights violations, and expecting a voice in war policy. I might as well molest a flag, right? Because god forbid we acknowledge that what happened on Rudy Giuliani Day pales in comparison to what we inflict around the world daily because of people like this.
“I make the cancer crack in the title, but, seriously, what’s the difference between believing I’m an expert in curing cancer and these people believing they need a say in how to “stop terror?””
Politics aside, the difference is that if the president met with a group of cancer survivors and relatives of non-survivors and said he was going to ask for their input on medical research policy, you wouldn’t have made a post like this to express moral indignation about it.
And I say politics aside, because other than that I agree that as a practical matter, simply having suffered a direct loss in the 9/11 attacks can’t have given these folks anything special to add to the discussion beyond simple revanchism, which anyone else could feel just as deeply. And which, as you say, is counterproductive to effective policymaking.
Your right Stacy, but you are also a bit disingenuous. It’s a matter of area and focus; relatives of cancer victims wanting to direct cancer treatment is a medical issue, relatives of terror victims wanting to control foreign policy is a political matter. Since this is mainly a politics blogs, it’s reasonable that Marc would address the politics but not the medicine. On the other hand, I know of several science and medical bloggers who would put up raving posts in the cancer case. There is actually a good analog in medicine; he parents of autistic children who suddenly became experts on vaccines. The medical bloggers have butted-head with them for years.
Thanks for this. It’s a lot more intelligible than I was when I was sputtering at the TV.
Moral indignation would be just as warranted if a bunch of relatives of cancer survivors insisted that their bereavement meant that their opinions on the appropriate allocation of anti-cancer resources should be heeded, rather than the people who are trained in, and experienced with, medical research. And certainly indignation would be warranted if they were actually allowed to influence policy, because their ignorance would end up costing other people their lives.
In the best-case scenario, Obama is just making warm fuzzy nice-nice with them so they’ll shut up and go away, but I agree that bowing to these people’s delusion that they’re somehow more qualified to make policy than any other random person with no expertise is a bad idea. They’ve already managed to more or less scuttle any proposals for the WTC site that include anything cultural, because something might end up being shown there that doesn’t come from a mindset of blinkered patriotism.
Sorry, Stacey, but if a bunch of cancer survivors started to demand that they knew better than doctors, and that homeopathy works better than chemo, they don’t deserve to be taken seriously, even if they’ve suffered trauma. And if the government did take them seriously because it was impolitic not to do so, I’d be sputtering with rage, because their bad ideas have serious consequences.
If:
1. The cancer victims’ families were saying, “oh, yes, of course, we should aggressively test experimental therapies on unwilling populations, particularly poor ones,” or,
2. They were saying, “All this research is stupid. You should make sure that every cancer patient has easy access to DNCB and homoeopathic mercury,” and,
3. It seemed possible that this could affect policy,
Then Marc would likely have to race me to post about it.
hey violet, isn’t that what all those chemtrails i see in the sky are?
Oh, terrorism listens when you freak out. Listens and laughs.
Calm heads, people!