Rob-Rivera.com

September 11, 5 Years Later

(NOTE: I get pretty opinionated here. My apologies, in advance.)

It was a Tuesday, if I’m not mistaken. I slept in that day, enjoying a prolonged sabbatical… I don’t remember what happened minute by minute but I do remember the first moments of my day that morning being something like out of a movie; I woke up to my mom opening the door to my room and with this awe-stricken look on her face, yellow rubber gloves covering her hands, staring at me to tell me that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s towers. I didn’t say a thing… the disbelief had me at a loss for words. I got up from my bed and walked outside to the kitchen where both my parents were, staring into this small TV mounted on a wall near the corner and in this TV the image of a skyscraper spewing smoke from its side was being shown as messages of “airplane crashes on the World Trade Center in NYC” while the newscasters speculated it might be a terrorist attack. Someone flipped the channels and that’s when everyone in the room realized that this thing was real: both national and international channels had the same live footage… the tower, spewing smoke, along with repeated, almost morbid footage of a plane ramming itself into the tower from 5 different camera angles… over, and over, and over again in the span of 5 minutes. I was already feeling saturated and downright uncomfortable with the sick focus on how the plane crashed with a full load of passengers inside and in what I’ve come to call a crazy account of cosmic timing, I was serving myself some coffee when I looked up at the small TV and saw the silhouette of another plane fly past the injured tower to hit its brother, a big explosion and even more smoke filling the air. I couldn’t believe it… no shocking angles, no pompous score, no slow motion, no THX sound to make the experience better… it was bleak, matter-of-fact and without any sound. Both my parents, myself and the voice on the TV kept silent as we saw what was happening before our very eyes… the coincidence theory got shot to hell and the claims of it being a terrorist attack where downright accepted.

Panama was, even if in a diminished scale, on a state of alert. Throughout the morning, as the reports of two other planes who would eventually crash in the Pentagon and in a field respectively the Panamanian government declared the country on a heightened state of alert; given our long and tenuous history with the United States and most specifically the Panama Canal we couldn’t afford to take any risks. That first day was rather frightening… no one knew what to do, and many privately-owned companies decided to close for the day while things calmed down. If i remember correctly even government offices called it a day early because of the uncertainty. The thing was all over the news, and it was definitely history in the making: many of the things we see and hear about have come about as a result of 9/11, from the way we get our news to TV shows and the like. I remember that a lot of people on the street were scared that George W. Bush, being the blockhead cowboy that he is, would decide to send troops to all of the U.S’s assets across the globe (one of them being the Panama Canal) in case there were more terrorist attacks underway. Why was the population scared of U.S troops coming down to protect the Canal, even though it was contractually not their problem anymore as of December 31st, 1999? Well, the last time they came down here was in December 20th, 1989: a day marked in Panamanian history as the day that the United States fucked us over for its government’s own personal goals.

The gist of the incident is this: General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the last of our dictators and the one who took power (rumors say he was placed there by the American government) right after General Omar Torrijos’ plane exploded, got out of line and the American government didn’t like it. They didn’t mind that he ran an international drug-trafficking network from the presidency and had everyone in a downright state of fear in a repressed society devoid of any real civil liberties. Noriega wanted more, and he was proving to be more than the U.S could handle. Since he couldn’t be controlled anymore, the excuse was to go in there and remove the evil dictator in order to establish a democratic government (does this sound familiar to you? anyone?) so on one December morning the U.S came in without any invitation and proceeded to kill anyone in sight. The result? 4,000 innocent Panamanians dead and the total destruction of the Chorrillo district, one of the capital’s most impoverished areas, all courtesy of the U.S armed troops. The city was in total chaos… we couldn’t defend ourselves since our “army” was with the dictator and the U.S army was stepping over anyone and anything that got in the way of their “removal.” After a couple of days of one-sided fighting, Noriega was removed and to this day is still awaiting trial… the Panamanian government wants him so he can be tried for his acts against the people but the States’ won’t release him, using some crazy loophole in their law system to keep him in American soil for as long as possible. Did I mention that Noriega used to be a U.S spy while he was dictator? (more on the December 20th attacks in this Wikipedia entry)

Later on in the day when various terrorist groups started to take the credit for orchestrating the attacks it was clear that Bubba Bush had gotten himself quite a handful of enemies across the globe. I stayed home, glued to the TV until i was sickened by the whole thing. The internet wasn’t as big as it is now but you could tell how quickly the information got around; this would mark a precedent in how information gets to news outlets and the eventual corruption of the outlets themselves. Love the U.S or hate it, the September 11th attacks in 2001 changed how the world operated and most importantly, made out of the U.S a very paranoid, very scared lion. And when the king of the jungle is scared and paranoid, you know we’re all going to pay for it… first was Iraq. I’m sorry if you sympathize with what the American government is doing to “protect your freedom” (must be pretty cold and lonely where you are though, considering the recent polls and what not), but the Iraq “War on ‘Terror’” is as much of a waste as my tail bone, and as much of a failure as the Vietnam war. If there’s anything good that has come out of this horrible attack against humanity whether you believe the government or the conspiracy theorists or none of them it would have to be the liberation of information. People got off their asses and are breaking news stories on the internet faster than the mainstream news outlets and I love it. Opinion is being valued and personal impressions, DIY art and many other forms of expression are being shelled out every day, and a large part of the U.S population (I believe) is seeing how ridiculous they look in regards to what the rest of the world thinks of them. The U.S is starting to realize from the inside what everyone else has been thinking for years… things are fucked up. The people who orchestrated the most despicable attack in modern history should rot in hell from where I’m standing but what the men in power have been doing for the past 5 years as a result of it is much, much worse. There are no heroes anymore… now the choices rely on which one’s the lesser evil. And if the world’s greatest superpower is such a mess in this moment then what’s to become of the world? With a megalomaniac, childlike president with a downright disgusting secret agenda that serves the companies he works for rather than the people who elected him to run the country for them, then what the hell is everyone else supposed to do?

I think that luckily, as a result of poor planning by the American president, the U.S’s credibility is dwindling and both the American people and other governments at a worldwide scale are noticing it. When you’re at the mercy of a communist country because said communist country gives you most of your oil so that you can send off your planes and tanks and troops across the globe to fight a war that, if you win it, will give you access to so much oil that you’ll never need anyone else to give you anything ever again then you’ve got the bull by the balls. If the DRM laws are approved in the United States, laws that would severely cripple the way we share information, we’ll fall into a “V for Vendetta” scenario of totalitarianism that, once Bush gets all the power he wants, will be unstoppable. If this sounds like a comic book to you then don’t laugh because things have become this ridiculous.

Politics get people all up in arms and those who aren’t passionate about it would rather just leave the topic alone. Hell, I don’t like talking about it myself because both politics and money bring out the worst in people and as a result I avoid getting into any of those topics like the plague. September 11th is specially a touchy subject to many people, and this is me writing from Panama… I can only imagine what it’s like in New York. So… it’s been 5 years now. Movies and mini series and books are coming out the ass on the subject with the resulting backlash of it being “too soon.” I remember that during the next few days after the tragedy and things were slowly cooling down the other news outlets would talk more openly about their feelings regarding the event and the zeitgeist was rather poignant and it’s stuck with me since it’s a prime example of the phrase that reads “it’s all a matter of perspective:” simply put, when hundreds of thousands of people die daily all over South America and the Middle East because of drugs, holy war, weapons, ideology, or all of the above, then it won’t get the airtime it deserves on CNN. When it happened to the U.S, though… then it was a global tragedy that demanded all of the world’s attention. The impressions that I got as days and weeks went by and I talked to people on the subject was that it took the U.S a direct hit on their integrity in order to realize that there’s evil in the world… big whoop. Don’t get me wrong: the tragedy was horrible and nobody is going to dispute that… but the news outlets (American ones) treated it as if it were the first real terrorist attack in the history of the modern world when in South America people are used to terrorist attacks all the time and the United States has never helped them. It’s like a beggar that asks the same rich dude that walks by his spot in the pavement for his spare change every day and the Monopoly Man in return spits in your empty cup and ignores you; one day you wake up and you see the same rich dude getting mugged and he’s asking for your help… the same guy who’s ignored you, treated you as a pushover and has spat on your cup for years is asking for your help. What would you do? Would you be noble and help him now that he knows what it’s like to be screwed over, or would you let him learn the lesson? Do you see how tricky the situation is?

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll just summarize by telling you about what my friend Key-K thought about the subject when I asked him many a year ago and his assessment rings true to this day: The United States has now become a reality TV show. The news channels are reality TV at its finest and that alone should be enough to make you sick to your stomach. Hopefully the victims of the attack don’t have to look down on the world from their cloud and laugh while crying for us, all at the same time. Of course, this is just my opinion… a Panamanian who wasn’t in U.S soil for the September 11th attacks and didn’t lose any loved ones that morning. Does that make this piece that much less poignant?

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