21st Century Schizoid Land
Nothing means anything anymore. I got that feeling as the TV was on and I heard the names of nearly 3,000 victims of 9/11 being read off one by one. This was just days after our withdrawal from Afghanistan and a swift overtaking of it by the very people we’d spent twenty years trying to keep out of power. They say “never forget”, but they never told us what it is we’re supposed to remember other than the senseless deaths of so many. It is up to the living to provide meaning to their deaths, and we are failing in that task.
Yes, people died. People were murdered. But what does that mean?
Nobody knows. The U.S. narrative has lost all meaning. I almost long for the early days when the response to that event coalesced in outrage and hatred and a desire for revenge. A desire to punish others without any concern for who those “others” actually were. Because crude and wrong though such sentiments were, at least they demonstrated some awareness of the connection between cause and effect.
The ending of a twenty-year war in which nothing was accomplished should be a time for reflection and reassessment. It should be a time for us to individually and collectively ask what the hell happened. And why. And how can we prevent it from ever happening again. Not like we did twenty years ago when our passions were inflamed and we felt we just had to do something, anything. No, twenty years should have given us plenty of time to develop perspective and a rational rather than an emotional response.
William T. Sherman said “War is hell.” If you don’t understand that, it is only because you have been sitting so far away from the inferno that you do not feel the heat. But the people who have been forced to feel the flames know. There have been millions who have felt the horrors of war far from our shores. All as a result of us getting a taste of the horror of war at home. “Never forget,” we say. But so much of the story of 9/11 has not merely been forgotten, it has never even been acknowledged in the first place.
I would disagree with General Sherman comparing war to Hell. War is not Hell, because the innocent are never sent to Hell. Hell is never inflicted upon young children, upon the blameless, upon animals and the earth itself. War is far worse than Hell, because Hell is reserved for the guilty. If it is possible, I hope that there can be concocted a Hell worse than war, because there needs to be a place in the afterlife for those who subject the innocent to war.
But we are incapable of counting the costs of war or asking where our actions have led us. We can no longer reconcile past events with current behavior. We’ve been forced to separate the two, because together they make no sense. We are forced to disassociate, compartmentalize our understanding, separate different aspects of ourselves because they do not fit together. Our psyche is like a series of differently designed cogs spinning separately that would smash and break apart should they ever touch.
We have become a schizophrenic nation. We are living in separate worlds without feeling the need to make them fit. We admire the different sections of the puzzle we’ve assembled without ever daring to stare at the whole picture.
We can hobnob with the aristocratic elite, shedding our masks as masked servants carry our train for us and justify it by putting “Tax The Rich” on our gown. We can call out the obvious hypocrisy of our political enemies while engaging in the same behavior. We can hold up events and facts as evidence of our rightness and then bury them as soon as they become evidence of our sins.
Story has taken precedence over objective reality. Facts only exist to plug the holes in our narrative, have value only so long as they fit and support that narrative. People are automatically cancelled when they speak truths inconvenient to the narrative, and they are automatically rehabilitated when they become useful to the narrative.
If we allow ourselves to disassociate from the reality of 9/11, its causes and its effects, we are most assuredly a doomed nation. If we cannot permit ourselves to step outside our political identities in order to ask honest questions about what the last twenty years have meant for our nation, we are merely two groups of patients occupying different wings of an insane asylum. The only difference being that in an asylum, the patients are kept from doing harm to themselves or others, while we walk around free with weapons more dangerous than any other era could have imagined.