Durka Durka
Of course they brought it on themselves!
Life is about choosing Durka, you can choose to be a part of the machinery of buy and sell, make-a-buck, anything for a dollar, “progress at any price”, everything’s for sale, consumption is freedom etc. etc. or you can choose to not be a part of the artifice of greed.
Was there some “moral” component involved…did they “deserve” to die a terrible senseless tragic death for simply working in the World Trade Center?
NO!
If asked why those people were at the office that morning, perhaps a typical answer would be; “I work here.” Unlikely you’d hear anyone say; “I’m here to perpetuate a system of economics that punishes the poor the elderly the ill and the disabled, the uneducated, third world nations and glamorizes consumption by elevating greed to the highest virtue.”
No, just a simple “I work here” as response is far more likely.
No correlation made between what their labors produced, what their labors meant to millions of people… whose existence never crossed their minds.
Aside from representing the financial capital of western greed hubris and disdain for the greater majority of fellow human beings scrabbling about in the dust, the World Trade Center was and of course it is being re-built as we speak…a monument to the postmodern non-absolute vagaries of a civilization embracing its own self-destruction in the name of ersatz “progress”.
Am I suggesting that the world would be a “better place” without commerce and trade?
NO!
I am suggesting that people directed, conditioned, brainwashed and “convinced” into believing that their actions are but miniscule movements in the machinery of commerce had no understanding or appreciation for the resonating effect of those miniscule actions on the lives of people all over this planet. Responsibility to each other doesn’t appear on the ledger of any corporations or banks books. It has no “value” can’t be commodified and is more than likely COMMUNIST in its origins as a concept…..
Nor by and large would any of them have really given a damn.
It’s the “economics of scale”…. American business ethos champions “buy low and sell high”, not unique by any standard to America and western societies, but unique in the sense that America “culture” teaches its people that a person’s “value” their “worth” to the world (and themselves) is product of how much money they have, what kind of car they drive, where they live in a house that’s far larger than they need….
A fervent belief that consumption is the hallmark of successful human evolution and that anything standing in the way of satisfying the groomed appetites of a consumer society is inherently and obviously EVIL.
If that requires that we sponsor oppressive regimes (including the self-destructive one that emerged in North America after the industrial revolution) or the ones that behead non-conformists, relegate women to chattels/property, “necessitates” building the largest and most formidable military engine ever seen by the human race to enforce it’s unconscionable behaviour…then so be it.
To the western mind the notion of Peace on Earth is…MY PIECE ON EARTH.
Is there something inherently wrong or evil in simply going to work in the morning? No of course not, you don’t work…you don’t eat!
These people chose to be there that morning. If they’d been working in Halifax or Paris or Tokyo or anywhere else in the world on that morning, they wouldn’t have suffered an untimely death at the hands of a criminal conspiracy with aspirations of divine calling…. They’d still be alive.
It’s far more comfortable and more easily integrated into what passes in our modern societies for “principles”, to believe that our actions don’t carry with them any responsibility to anyone else. We see it all the time. Union Carbide demonstrated their embrace of humanity in Bhopal….but hey it didn’t happen in America so it was really NO BIG DEAL….Exxon demonstrates the modern truism of internal combustion engine-centric economies with the Exxon Valdez, a slight splash on the pages of the worlds newspapers, but the number of tanker “accidents” is far larger and gone on far longer than anyone wishes to admit…
But these, these are dismissed easily…they were accidents…that the rationale behind building the plant in Bhopal was that Union Carbide could free itself of tethers and restrictions these “nut-bar” environmentalists bludgeoned governments into imposing isn’t as readily discussed. Exxon is simply satisfying the appetites of a society cultured into a love affair with the automobile and the drive-thru….
There’s PROFIT in building obsolescence into everything from vehicles to television sets to running shoes… There’s PROFIT in encouraging competition for social acceptance based on “ownership”. There’s PROFIT in erecting as sub-class of ethnic minorities to clean pools, collect the garbage, do all those dirty nasty chores that good decent white folk shouldn’t really have to do…..
Alternate energy sources have only ever been “tinkered-with”, kind of a curiosity to the energy combines. Why would any enterprising industrialist be interested in anything other than profit???? So long as the price of a barrel of oil (regardless of the political and human-dynamics involved in that choice) was low enough to offer the opportunity to reap astronomical profits….who cares????
Yes these people brought it on themselves…as do we all.
Western governments make choices about the longevity and quality of life of millions around the world on a daily basis. Choosing to forego concerns over whether an industry or a resource is a sustainable commodity that can offer long-term advantage to the locals….WHO CARES ABOUT THE LOCALS??
As long as there’s a profit to be made…by that one or two percent who control the wealth of nations…insurrections, pollution, “regime-change”, revolutions, climactic and planetary disasters aren’t line-items on the books…why should anyone be concerned…..?
Does our rejection of our own humanity give license to these hooligans to murder our friends and our families?
OF COURSE NOT!
JUST AS OUR GREED DOESN”T GRANT LICENSE TO PERPETUATE A DEPLORABLE IMBALANCE. An imbalance that is addressable, that is not an insurmountable element of the human condition, but a choice we’ve made.
Those people had it coming…AND SO DO WE ALL!
