Every
word spoken or sung, every action or deed, every thing that happened before
September 11th seems to belong in a different era. It’ll probably be easy to think otherwise a few months or a year from
now, but future historians with the benefit of hindsight will clearly see the
bright marker of that Tuesday morning. We must not kid ourselves the new
millennium starts here- we really aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Instead
we’re arguably at the most important point in human history, where we wake up
from the mistakes of our adolescence or we’re cut down in our prime. The future of our world depends on so many
of the decisions we take now. And our individual actions are just as important
as those of our leaders.
The
terrorists must be brought to justice, but justice must work for the entire
world. Surely ‘the world is what we make it’ is as valid a phrase as ‘we are
what we eat’.
There’s
a tendency to feel powerless these days, to blame everyone else for our
problems. To some extent this might be
true, as in a society of winners and losers the level playing field is often
reserved for those born with an invite.
In
the years after World War II collective ‘peace’ gave way to individual
‘warfare’ as successive generations sought to take, take, take with no thought
for the consequences of marginalizing their fellow human beings. Those consequences are visible in the
western world’s crime ridden inner cities, in the rampant drug abuse of our
populations and in the loss of innocence in our children. They’re visible in the disturbed actions of
loners and in the unthinkable act of a teenage girl prepared to discard her
newborn baby in a wastebasket. Cause
and effect is an unwelcome truth in a world that turns its back on anything
other than individual perspective and shrugs its shoulders at personal
responsibility.
The
key word here is ‘world’. Nothing
happens in isolation. Until September
11th the increasingly violent acts of the maligned in North America and other
western societies caught most of OUR attention. Now we’re forced to look at the consequences of our ‘winner takes
all’ mentality on the rest of the globe.
The immediate effect is a war partially of our own making, a war that
will begin with bullets and bombs but must end with reconciliation.
Terrorism
should and must be destroyed but so must the inequalities and injustices that
lead people to such despicable acts.
Each and every one us can begin that process by showing the world that
western society is capable of more than “You’re the Weakest Link,
Goodbye.” Caring government comes from
caring voters. And if I can be bold
enough to alter the words - if not the meaning- of a great U.S. president, ’Ask
not what your world can do for you- ask what you can do for your world’.
Mark
Connolly 14th September 2001