It was a fucking weird experience dude, nobody really…talked about it.

The one thing: I got into a cab on the 12th to go hang w/ the Americans and before I even said “xi shi dao jie” he asked me if I had any family New York and if anyone was hurt and kept asking me if I was OK.

I think that’s why I’m so weird on this whole thing anyway–besides the night that I spent with Nate and Tekla, I didn’t think about it all that much. Not to say I didn’t watch the news, but Chinese news is useless anyway.

Jane – you’re not kidding. Some of my students have cram-school classes every day – Sunday through Sunday. I can’t imagine would I would’ve done in their position, given the kind of student I always was.

John – right you are. Most of the people I chatted with were at least aware that 9/11 existed. I wasn’t even trying to bring it up in conversation; they mentioned it themselves.

Lindsay – hey, I’m on your side on this one. Registered Green. Tens of thousands of Iraqi kids die every year because of US sanctions; Cuban kids drink lye thinking that it’s lemonade because the US has blocked sales of soap. The US government is a bunch of shitheads and the War on Terrorism is a stupid idea. You’ll see no argument here.
Does all of that make the US’s self-righteous rhetoric hypocritical? Sure. Does it lessen the extent of the 9/11 killings? No. Nor does it lessen the pathos.
Anyway – it turns out that a lot of the students I was teaching did know, because some of them talked to me about it the next day; the kids I was teaching in this post were second-graders.

Sarah – That’s kind of my opinion. In fact, I hadn’t planned to think about 9/11 at all this year until suddenly on the evening of 9/10, a Chinese friend asked me how I was going to spend the next day. It’s funny, the things that can make you homesick.

But yeah, little kids in China don’t usually watch the news or even care because they can’t relate or understand. But then again, other children around the world aren’t all that much better.

The US kills tens of thousands of people “for the good of others”. I don’t claim to know everything that’s going on right now, but I know the US has caused quite a number of people to die, specifically in the “troubled” countries. Not because they were guilty of any crime, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because the US was trying to bring down their government, etc.

And considering the things many other countries have gone through, September 11th isn’t a big thing. No one deserves what happened, but some feel the US is a big hypocrite for not caring about others lives and only those of its own citizens, which is understandable…but not when they don’t understand why everyone else cares about THEIR own countries citizens. Like, “hey, you were bad, people died, your fault”, but when it happens to the US, it’s 100% someone elses fault.

Nothing excuses what happened, but the US (I don’t mean the innocent unsuspecting people who died, but the government and a few others) is partially, if not very much, to blame for what happened.

I’m as cynical regarding the country as anyone else, Meris Ann, but it’s a bit of an overreaction to say that it’s going to be overdone to that extent. Educated, intelligent people are generally able to place Pearl Harbor within its appropriate context in WWII, and that’s probably the most apt parallel in recent memory.

People express things as their culture allows them–the average person isn’t going to write a treatise or compose a symphony or write a book in memory or solidarity, so people seek an outlet, and that outlet is going to be defined by culture.

In an unfortunate, perverted way, it’s rather liturgical. The liturgy exists to provide a context to say things when the individual fails to come up with anything appropriate. We don’t have a liturgical culture.

We have an odd culture. It’s consumerist, and materialist, and mass-market, and clich?-but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the masses who attempt to express their sorrow/sympathy through that culture don’t genuinely experience that sorrow/sympathy.

I’m not arguing for jingoism here. I’m not saying that you’ve got to run around with a flag and madly support the government if you want to avoid interrogation–I’m spending next weekend at a conference on the renewed need for conscientious objection. But let’s not get so bitter.

“We should do X, but…” generally means, “We should stop doing X.” And maybe we have been remembering and honoring them every day since September 11, 2001, but–they’ve also been dead every day since September 11, 2001.

I don’t know.