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Originally Posted by roachboy
and i remember thinking that the chickens had come home to roost and wondered who said that later i remembered it was malcolm x.
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Yes, this was a sentiment that came up among the American students I met with that night, in a Reykjavik bar... we all agreed that while it was horribly shocking, none of us took on the "victim" stance that seemed to envelop those still in the US. Living abroad, with exchange students from many other nations in the conversation with us, there was little else to say... we didn't want to say it, but we felt that this was somehow inevitable (keep in mind that usually, students who go abroad to study are already liberal in attitude--so don't expect us to conform to the usual patriotic ideals). This doesn't diminish the sorrow of the event, but we were university students, and wanted to discuss the causes and what might happen next, internationally.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
i remember thinking that everyone, all around, had gone insane.
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We Americans in Iceland had much the same feeling, seeing coverage on CNN and reading newspapers online... we missed all of that flag-waving madness, and somehow I am not sad about that. I remember coming back in May 2002 and taking a while to recognize my country again.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
by now, by 9/11/2008, this has been pulverized: used and abused, drained of meaning and filled again, spit back at us over and over and over.
remembrance becomes a game.
let us stop as we are required by all public machinery to remember why everything that's happened since 9/11/2001 has happened.
let us remember how the dead have been used, again and again.
let us remember how grief became cheap became a commodity became a justification.
let us remember what made this grief seem cheap, a commodity, a justification.
and from underneath all that, remember the genuine grief of those who lost people in the trade center and try to separate that from how that's been used.
it isn't easy.
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Thanks for the reminder, rb. Agreed.