All the Wrong Messages

Anger, violence, and war may or may not be intrinsic to human nature. But judging from the crowd around the World Trade Center site today, exploitation is unavoidable.

I didn’t even care about the tacky hawkers of souvenir “mementoes” and picture books and the like. Their sort of commercial exploitation is clearly inevitable but also pretty easy to ignore.

The ones I mean are the ones who have specifically fastened onto the events of 9/11 for their own narrow ends: the conspiracy theorists; the bullies-for-Jesus; the mean-spirited guiltists who want to throw all responsibility for the attacks on us, the US people, as if it were a justified response to our leaders’ ill-advised Middle East policy in earlier years.

The nadir of the breed, of course, is the absolutely execrable Westboro Baptist Church, those self-proclaimed upstanding Christians who marked this event with off-key singing and garish signs which read things like, “Thank God for 9/11.” I ask you. Thank God? Why? Because, in spite of being the omnipotent creator of the universe, He gets off on killing people in horrific ways and wanted to send us a message about gays, abortion, or possibly our shameful Constitutional acceptance of belief systems other than the Westboro Baptist Church’s? The logic is impenetrable, the message nothing but a bunch of anti-Christian, hate-filled bullying.

But, while these human cockroaches are so far outside the mainstream and so pathetic that they’re easy to condemn and dismiss, what struck me today is that all the other groups leaching on to this day were not really any different. Really, much as I disliked George Bush, he did not orchestrate the attacks. Neither did a secret cabal in the CIA or a secret cabal of Jews. The world has not committed a terrible sin by focusing on the fall of the Twin Towers and ignoring the other buildings that were destroyed that day and in the weeks following. Our desperation for jobs in the current economy is not rooted in the attacks. And really, the final, bottom line lesson of 9/11 is not, “America needs to pray.”

All these messages were shouted, held up, or otherwise used to bludgeon us as we made our way around the site today. We were both disgusted with all these people. And there’s not much more to say than that. A national disaster is bad enough on its own. We really shouldn’t have to get beat up and bullied all over again by people who see it only as a means to their own particular ends.