The Artistic Response to Group Hatreds

Hello Fellow Seekers of Light and Truth,

Well, I've found yet another thing that pisses me off. I'm gonna have to add one more thing to this list. I know that I can't focus too much on anger, and that I've got to be positive. I know this, I understand this. However, I cannot sit idly by while wrong is done. This time, said wrong is especially insidious and horrible, because it is packaged as "truth," and "virtue," and "religious freedom," and "family values," and then taught to children as gospel truth. Here, the children who are victims become the villains.



You might have come across this video. It comes from Greensburg, Indiana, from a church called the Apostilic Truth Tabernacle. The sickest part of this video is the orgy of applause that the adults, and how they egg the kid on after he is done gleefully exclaiming that 10% of the population deserves to DIE and GO TO HELL. This is the kind of vile public attack on a group usually reserved for Taliban country, or some hideous fascist regime from the 30's, where the Jew was the predator that was corrupting  our fatherland. And don't try to argue on this point because, Oh, they're not calling for anyone to be killed, or They don't hate anybody, they just don't want their kids to think it's okay.

First of all, even if this group hasn't called for anybody to be killed, others have called for it. Listen to Pastor Curtis Knapp from Seneca, Kansas's New Hope Baptist Church.



What sickens me the most is that these men bully, berate, and demonize an entire population, and then they run and hide behind God and Scripture. They don't even have the courage of their convictions to own their hatred and prejudice. While seeing the child's glee is sickening, it is ultimately the adults who are the most at fault. It is the preacher for denying his own insecurity, and flawed nature, by condemning innocent human beings to death, damnation and public contempt just because of who they are driven to love and marry.


This is another truly disturbing video, shown on Saudi TV. If you'll notice, the 3-year-old girl is spouting the same ideas about Jews' alleged guilt as have been used through the millenia to rationalize pogroms, barbarian attacks, and ultimately the Holocaust. This hateful ideology, once again, sung sweetly into the innocent ears of a child, makes me feel nothing but rage. Rage because I know where this leads. This leads directly to genocide, it happened in Germany, it happened in Kosovo, it's happened without much notice in many other places.

I have to be honest, as I watch this kid sing, and as I see the adults riotously applaud, there's an animalistic part of my brain that wants to go, and punch and kick everybody in that audience. The only thing that sickens me even worse than seeing a person hurt, is seeing injustice, cheered and affirmed as righteousness. I used to have a big problem with anger, and sometimes I still get overwhelmed by it. I would only hit another kid in anger, hard as I could, then I would feel really bad for him when I saw him in pain.

There is something visceral about the anger I have when people cheer the beating and attacking of the helpless, the innocent, the righteous. This is just as much violence against a people as going and lynching them. Remember Tyler Clementi, two years ago? He was the Rutgers Student who was outed having a gay affair by his roommate, and then killed himself because he was embarrassed by his peers. They gave the roommate a joke, slap-on-the-hand sentence. Here, the humiliation, the damage, and the no doubt the permanent demonization in the minds of some of his classmates is the key component of the violence done to him, that destroyed him to the point where he felt only death would save him. As far as I'm concerned, if you cause that to happen to a person, you are directly responsible for his death.

I might have told you this, but I first read the book 1984 when I was 15 years old. It was a dark, confusing time in my life. I deeply identified with the struggle against a great tyrannical order. What was even more terrible about this, was that they had the people in their minds and hearts, the people who would surely know this was not just, fully believed that it was the only justice. Even the protagonist was defeated in his own mind and disowned himself, giving himself over to the lie. For a while, because of this, I lost faith in humanity. If we could be conned and taught to embrace such evil, what hope was there? We are all guilty, no matter what our nationality, religion, or societal structure.
Later, I began to learn about Eastern spiritual principles. What has stuck with me about these is that they de-emphasize the doctrine of it, and are more in tune with the flow of life itself. I later came to realize that it was the doctrinal, rhetorical emphasis that lay at the roots of this collective sin, at the risk of getting religious here. When I reviewed literature on Orwell's life and work, five years later, for a review of literature I was doing for Comm. Studies, I realized that what he was attacking was the lock-step behavior of people when they gather in groups.

Groupthink is a term that's come to be used often because of Orwell's work. I've come to use it often myself. Here, we need to ponder a lot about what it means, because I believe it holds some answers. What it means is when people get into groups, their collective behavior and thought process tends to focus on the group's preservation, rather than individual well-being or ethics. In other words, it becomes about how do we win rather than how do we care for each other, and what is the best for everyone. 1984 was an extreme example of this, but the disturbing thing is, all societies embrace this groupthink to some extent.

Think about why the parents gleefully taught this kid to desparage "the homos." It was because, at this church, the doctrine says that gays are evil. That's what the Minister preaches. It is similar to the "two minutes hate," shown in 1984, in that it trains the churchgoers to hate them as the sinners from whom all of the world's problems originate. Then they are trained to praise a "hero" who destroys the "villain," in this case, the child who is taught that when he damns people with his words, he will be rewarded, affirmed. Let's not be ambiguous here: this is violence. This is the reason so many gay, lesbian and transgender kids are killing themselves. This social torture makes them feel so rotten about themselves. When you are told you are worthless, dirty, and evil over and over again, you begin to feel dead inside, to internalize the pain.



So why would I be talking about all of this on an arts blog? Over and over, I have thought about what I would say to the question "Why do you get so political on an arts blog?" Well, as I have alluded to, I used to be much more overtly political and ideological. In fact, not long ago, I thought about getting into politics myself. I was always tense, on edge back then. I would spend hours arguing with points of view in my mind. This made life less enjoyable and more tense and argumentative. Long story short, I realized that there was something about the human experience that I saw, that demanded more than just political activism and struggle. In the last few years, the times when I have learned the most about how to heal people, is when I have explored life without judgement, with a creative eye.

The above video is from a year and a half ago. Joel Burns, a Gay City Councilman from Fort Worth, Texas, decided to give this speech after a rash of young gay kids commiting suicide, just to assure them that they were not alone. Listen to it, please. I couldn't listen to it without tears welling up. It's just a human reaction, I think. This crystallizes what my approach to issue-tackling has been over the last two years. It has to do with working from the experience we have in common, rather than the doctrines that make some good and others evil. Here, kids learn, again, from groupthink strategies, that the only way they can be accepted is for them to either ostracize, humiliate, or physically destroy some kid just because he looks different.

What this blog is about is the experience of life. The heartbreak, the love, the pain, the violence, the redemption. That is why I am talking about groupthink now. It inhibits us from owning our own life experience. We feel like we have to sell ourselves to feel liked, secure, complete. We can't claim our own experience, instead, we are subconsciously taught to hate ourselves in a variety of ways. You know, one thing I was shocked to learn is that when you watch an ad, 90% of what you take in is on a subcoscious level.

This process of melding our groupthink through ads, TV shows, movies, even stories we tell each other, does intense damage to people who are attracted to the "wrong" sex, but I believe it is not just limited to gays. Like I said, I have always loved girls, but what I find distressing is that, when boys get interested in girls, there is a certain unwritten script they expect you both to follow. The girl is expected to be the needy, emotional one who needs protection, and the boy must be confident, able to throw down at all times to protect her, and absent, except for sex. I realized early on that the script wasn't going to work for me. I came to want romance with girls, but something has always bugged me about the blind obedience people have to this way, and the condemnation you face if you ever stray from it.

I could give endless examples. The point is, groupthink kills our potential as human beings. What we need is to find our own way, and find attachments to people and groups that differentiate, in other words, they set boundaries so that we can stay free from the echo chamber that produces prejudices and hatreds against outsiders. We must learn to do this so that our children learn that NO group is sinful or evil by nature of is being different. In order that our children grow up to realize their full potential to live with others, and not claim the contempts of their parents as God's will, remember what I mentioned in the Bully post, the guy who said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Undoubtedly, some will interpret this to mean that God is without sin, and therefore, God is expressing his hatred of these groups through Christians' discrimination. To me, it means that none of us has the authority to universally condemn another group as intrinsically evil, for the same sins they possess also exist in us. We all have potential to bad, but we are not defined as creatures of sin. That's the main qualm I have with Christianity; all it seems to see is our bad. We need not be defined by our baser tribal instincts, though.

Well, I'll leave it at that for now. Undoubtedly, I'll talk more about this at a future date. I saw this, and as I said I got so angry about it that I decided to convert my angry energy into creative work. It is the same principle I used in my post on Newt Gingrich. So, anyway, I'll have some more good material for you soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

Why I Didn't Celebrate the Death of Osama Bin Laden

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Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

One year ago, we got some big news. I think you remember what happened. On Sunday night, May 1, 2011, we found out that Navy SEALs had raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (30 miles north of Islamabad, like the Pakistani version of Manassas, Virginia), and shot Osama Bin Laden dead. I found out about it from Facebook comments from people. I didn't believe it at first, because you hear all sorts of things on the internet, but then we turned on CBS, and there was Obama, delivering the following announcement.



When I heard this, I felt all sorts of conflicting, excited emotions. There was the amazing revelation that something I didn't think could ever happen, just happened. The main conflict was between two feelings, the first was a grim satisfaction that We got him. That was my main feeling, that I hate it when the criminals get away. I believe people need to pay for their crimes. I really wanted him to pay for what he did to all those people, all their families, all their friends, coworkers, and all the people who cared about them.

All of them had a huge, horrific whole ripped in their lives that Tuesday morning in the late Summer of 2001. At least all those terrified people who jumped out of the 87th Floor of that building to their deaths, or the people on the planes who made teary last calls to their families, or employees who burned to death in the Pentagon, will not be left behind as a "cold case."

On the other hand, though, I just cannot bring myself to celebrate death, in any way, shape, or form. You might think that's a sappy way to go, but, quite frankly, I am done giving a damn. I used to take a lot of pleasure in the thought of hitting back at someone who wronged me, even if it was only a wrong to me, but I could never stand the sight of someone suffering. It's something that seeps into my consciousness, and I feel this need to make it stop. Thus, when I was about 14 or 15, I decided that hatred was an addiction that I needed to swear off. Ever since, any celebration of death has bothered me deeply. Let me backtrack, though, and talk about how I got to where I am on this issue.

I remember the morning of that September 11 very clearly still. I remember having breakfast, I was having Lucky Charms, my favorite cereal, as an 11-year-old kid, and my Mom told me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I assumed it must have been an accident, it must have been cloudy. Mom told me it was a terrorist attack. She said it pretty straightforwardly, without much apparent surprise. When I went to school, I was still a little freaked out by my new setting. I had not been in middle school for a week, even, I had just started the previous Wednesday, and when everyone in class started talking about it, I realized what had gone on.

What I remember most, is hearing the teacher talking about the kind of planes that crashed into the towers. "These were big planes," she said. I found out later that these were not light propeller-driven planes, but huge passenger jets, 757-s and 767-s, both of which are massive. You have to understand that back then, I was a huge aviation geek. I loved machines that flew, and I was especially in awe of those passenger jets we often jump on and take for granted. I must have been one of the few people that got excited to get on a plane. It seemed like such a freeing thing to me.

An example of a drawing of jets that I often do. I have done so many of these it's not even funny.

It seemed bizarre to me that such beautiful, amazing machines could be used for such a terrible, destructive purpose. I spent the whole day not getting what went on, and wanting to get what it was that affected everybody that day. I remember getting scared about it that day when my new P.E. teacher was ostracizing us for talking too much. It was just a confusing day, all in all. After I got back from school, we were staring at the TV news ceaselessly, blankly trying to figure out what this was all about. My Dad finally turned it off and said "It's really easy to just veg out and watch TV, but let's not." Probably a good idea, in retrospect. However, in the dark days, weeks, months and the following year, TV coverage like this was something I saw regularly.



By the way, the point of the above segment was the speech from Donald Rumsfeld. His speech also included a line to the effect of "If anyone says this is an attack on the Afghan people, they're wrong." I remember being so thrilled about the speech, and that the US was bombing Afghanistan. After all, those guys had killed our people, we had to go get 'em. That gets to the central journey I have made, lo these 10-plus years since that day at the end of Summer.

I was a really patriotic kid back then, if only because of my goody-two-shoes nature. Still, I really wanted to get the people that did it. I was an 11-year-old boy, I wasn't about to take an attack from some foreigner lying down. I knew that the bad guys were a group called Al-qaeda (I heard it pronounced "Al Kita" which added another level of bizarreness to it), and the main villain was a guy in Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden, who was the ringleader of another group called the Taliban. As unclear as I was on who these guys were and what their problem was, I knew we needed to take them out.

At the same time, when my Dad told me we were now at war, I got scared, because I got this image of old-school, nuclear war-type scenarios. Even then, I knew that war meant you could get hurt, you could be killed, and so could your whole family. I got anxious then, as I often did when unexpected things happened to me in my youth.

At about this time, I began to learn about a group of religious people called the Muslims. In the months after 9/11, I heard people talk about "Muslim-this," and "Islamic-that," but I had no idea what any of it referred to. In the 7th grade, our teacher took us through the world's religions. She told us that around 600 AD, a man named Muhammad (I've never figured out how to properly spell this name, forgive me) traveled through the desert in what is today Saudi Arabia, and found a bunch of guys worshipping false idols, and in general, acting quite badly.

Then one day, he went into a cave, and had a vision from God, whom they call Allah, and went forth to spread the word. Muhammad was only a prohpet, a messenger of God's vision. Today, that cave is a Holy Site to all Muslims. There are also five central demands in Islam, called the Five Pillars. They include prayer five times a day, facing the Holy City in Mecca, and at least one trip in believers' lives to said Holy City.

The ubiquitous image of the terrorist we are shown. I did this as a mock-up of a picture you would find on TV news about an international terrorist (hence the made-up foreign intel label in the bottom left). I assure you this was entirely fictionalized, but it does have truth to it, does it not?

I later found out that this religion had drawn a lot of suspicion from people here in the US, and later Europe. Because of religious customs in many Middle Eastern countries, people argue that the religion itself is wrong. I drew the above picture four years ago, to capture the familiar theme we find in the news, of the scary Muslim guy who tried to blow something up. Since the 80's, with the destruction of Flight 103, we've been seeing this picture of Middle Eastern guilt shown to us, over and over again.

This despite the fact that, as I mentioned in my post on terrorism on the 10th Anniversary of Daniel Pearl's death, that the majority of victims of Islamic terrorists are Muslims themselves, including about 2% of the 9/11 victims. All you get in our media is images and stories of the scary Muslims who are gonna blow you up or make your country adopt Sharia Law, and when everyone on the TV agrees on that, and all your friends and family believe in it, that becomes your reality.

The first time I realized it was after the Iraq War. In the early winter months of 2003, we began to hear talk of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and "WMD's" weapons of mass destruction. Our government were telling us that we needed to invade now, before the "smoking gun" became a "mushroom cloud." Yet I began to hear a bigger group of people saying that there weren't weapons, there were other ways of dealing with the problem, and we needed to have the UN verify this to be true. I came to find out later that none of this was allowed to happen.

So the orgiastic beginning of this war was dismaying to me, since I was just beginning to discover that war and hurting could be wrong. My country could be wrong. Our country can be responsible for the deaths of families, of children, of people who do not deserve to die. That's never an easy learning experience.

It is only in the months and years that followed September 11th, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War, that I have understood what those events truly mean. I have been just as angry at the terrorists from Al-qaeda and all the related networks as I have been at US Government officials, upon discovering their deceit, and callous disregard for people's very lives. Not only foreigners, these people don't give a damn about protecting us from anything. It is this kind of anger and despair about the world that has propelled me into meditation on this condition of getting shafted called the human condition.

For years, I felt a lot of anger about the world, about all the pain, unfairness, and loneliness I felt as if it were my own experience. I didn't even have the words to say what it was, accurately, much less the will to discuss it with anyone. As much anger as I felt, I felt it all because there was so little connection of people to each other. They were all in their own tunnel world, thinking about themselves, their cliques of friends, race, family, nation, economic status, and religion.

A dark voice inside me whispered, This is human nature, this is how it is, it is part of you, join it, give in. I was not going to give up, I was not going to be just another stooge to power, to nation, to religion, to Groupthink, as George Orwell termed it. I was going to defeat the dark part of my nature, while everyone else gave in to it in the form of supporting wars, killing in other countries, and all.

So why did I not celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden? Well, because I just don't celebrate death, even if it is the death of a scumbag. Don't get me wrong, what Bin Laden did, not only on 9/11, but in running this collection of bad, bad people in Al-qaeda, and in his Holy War in the US, which included attacking our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and our ship in Yemen in 2000, personified what evil means. To me, evil is not about a person, it is about what they do, and how they do it. Bin Laden conducted the killing of human beings with cool, steely composure, and pleasure in his work, the terrible deaths of people.

Yet, what were we doing the night he was killed? Celebrating like rowdy fraternity brothers, celebrating death. Where does that leave us? Everybody I heard in the news expressed sheer delight that he had died. Even Elie Wiesel, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, said that the death was well-deserved. Rudy Giuliani implied that if you aren't feeling a little gleeful, you're in denial. All they tell you is that it's human nature to take glee in the enemy's death, as if that's all human nature is: barbarism and vengeance. Even Jon Stewart, whom I usually like and admire, joined in the antics.

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What is even worse than him ridiculing the notion that maybe we shouldn't be having an orgy over this event, that maybe it was ambivalent, is his phallic implication at the end, there. That boils down to what most international conflict is about. Listen to a bit of George Carlin's famous Jammin' in New York special from 1992, about the Gulf War that had played out much like this Iraq War did.



You might find this offensive, but I think the point needs to be made that war is about proving who is tougher, who has more might, power or virtue, in other words, whose masculinity is more potent(because, at the risk of making a feminist statement, it is mainly men who are part of wars, but I digress). That's why I believe wars, killing, and hatred are not only destructive, but ultimately futile. After all, sooner or later, you will no longer be able to win power struggles consistently.

Ultimately, these assassinations are more symbolic than anything else. To Al-qaeda, the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon were symbolic of America's power. That's the main reason the terrorists chose to crash planes into them, because they had been trying to attack civilian jet liners for a long time, and several members of Al-qaeda's planning team were showing interest in the Twin Towers as potential targets. To us, here in the US, Bin Laden became the big bad guy. He was the symbol for all that was evil in this world. So I get why people would celebrate the killing of this terrible mastermind.

However, seeing the huge spectacle of raucous celebrations at this raid made me, just, spiritually ill. You may remember the outrage surrounding the picture of Palestinians celebrating as the planes crashed into the buildings.

I saw a picture similar to this one in the LA Times the day after 9/11. Even at my young age, I was coolheaded enough to realize the paper was probably doing it because they wanted war. A war would be good for their news. Yet it made me boil in rage nonetheless. There is no reason to celebrate death. Period. That's what is so awful about these celebrations. It isn't just that we've learned nothing from the errors of the Middle East, it's also that we would spit in the face of anyone who would tell us different from what we want to hear. Remember the story of the girl who trashed the Martin Luther King quote from my post on MLK Day? That to me was the height of arrogance and a willful, malicious variety of ignorance that is so often our error as a culture.

Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should mention this. Not everybody in Palestine was celebrating that day. Below is a photo from a large group of Palestinian students who held a long, silent vigil for their fellow children lost 5,000 miles away. You can find the link to the story here.

You're not gonna see this in the news. It doesn't fit into the neat little narrative that "sells" in the west. Our news outlets like CNN and the New York Times would be terrified of appearing to be "liberal" or "politically correct." So ironically, in their urge to not be politically correct, they come to serve another type of political correctness.

This goes to show that you do not have to celebrate death. Now, there is a difference, I want to make it clear that I know this. I am not defending Osama Bin Laden, and I am certainly not defending anything he ever did or stood for. What he did was wrong and it was evil, there is no dispute about that here.

However, I find it interesting that no one would listen to what the demands of Al-qaeda and all kinds of people in the Middle East are. That doesn't mean we should grant all the demands, that would be unrealistic and would let them off the hook too much. We need to know what the demands are, so we can decide what to allow, and what to stand firm on. We haven't done any of that, though, we've just insisted "They hate us for our freedom!"

The death of Osama Bin Laden was, for me, more a grim relief than anything else. My thought process was "At least he won't be able to hurt anyone anymore." We could learn from this relief, though, rather than go into an orgy of nationalism and machissmo. We must understand that we cannot accept that our government plays power broker all over the world, and expect that it won't come back to haunt us. This does not mean that we are to blame, however, if we stay silent while our government carries out unethical, undemocratic activities, such as the Iranian Coup of 1953, we are implicitly accepting it as normal.

We need to understand that while we, as individuals, may hold certain ideals, when it comes to our culture, the only thing others see, and judge us on, is our actions. We can't expect to keep our governmental status quo going and get more equitable and just results. We also need to have compassion, both for ourselves, and for other national bodies, even as we hold responsible the appropriate power players, be they heads of state, military leaders, or militants acting outside any national authority. Bottom line, if you commit the crime, you do the time, as Robert DeNiro once said.

This grim justice is not a cause to party. It is a cause for a more reflective relief. I believe we should be glad that at the very least, these horrible crimes were answered for. This does not mean that all terrorism has ended. We like to believe that once we "get" the main bad guy, all is won, but remember, this is the "War on Terror," which, by the way, you can't permanently win.

What you can do is root out the desperation and sense of wrong that makes terrorism seem so necessary for the peasants of Afghanistan, Yemen, and so forth. It was rich Saudis that funded Al-qaeda, whom the Taliban gave safe haven. From that, all sorts of people along that barren stretch of land on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border supported the terrorist network. The good news is that Al-qaeda is now on the run, and they are having less and less credibility throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

The even better news is that most of the people on Earth are not sociopaths at their core. We realize, on some level, that pain is bad. From that starting point, let us learn now that it will not work to simply pin all of the evil in the world onto one man or group, sacrifice them, and believe evil has been purged. This can just as easily pinned on the righteous as it can be on the wicked. Rather, we must realize that there is a part in all of us, from the best to the worst human beings, that urges us to destroy, and to take glee in that destruction.

Often, when we pin evil on someone, putting all that urge to destroy on them becomes more natural, more just. We must face that part of ourselves and say "I don't need that high. I don't need the glee in destruction, even in the truly wicked." After all, working on this projection of our destructive will toward the "evil ones" is what allowed Bin Laden and sociopaths like him to recruit, train, and facilitate real evil. We can step out of that cycle.

Well, I'm sorry this post ended up taking so long, but like I said, I had a lot of contradictory emotions going on when this happened a year ago. I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to feel about it. Venting on my knowledge, and my experience over the years has really helped clarify my aim here. As I was typing, all sorts of memories were coming back that I felt I needed to share with you. I feel this perspective was underrepresented in this story, and needed to be shared. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, feelings, comments, or anything on this you would like to share, please feel free.

I included this post on this blog because I believe our artistic experience can help us see the world in ways we may not have before. I hope that discussion on this helps bring a creative, innovative energy out into the world. I'll have some more good stuff for you soon. Thanks for listening.

See ya!

Terrorism Hurts Everybody

Hi everybody,

As you may know, today marks the 10th anniversary since Daniel Pearl's death. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal international correspondent, who broke many stories around the world, including an incident where a US airstrike on a supposed weapons factory in Sudan actually hit an aspirin factory. In early 2002, he was sent to Pakistan to search for al qaeda moles in the Pakistani government, was subsequently abducted by one, held for demands from al qaeda, and then murdered by beheading.

When I learned of this act in depth, it was the barbarism of the acts that made me so mad about it. It was a feeling of simultaneous anger and disgust at the act. You know how he was killed? He was decapitated (head cut off), then chopped into ten pieces, and thrown in a ditch someplace in Pakistan. What other word is there for an act like that but pure animal savagery. It's just a horrible thing to do to anyone of any nationality. When I hear about groups like al qaeda carrying out acts like this against people doing their job, I almost understand the kind of guttural anger that drives people like Dick Cheney to want to bomb countries out of existence, or Rick Perry to have criminals executed, even if they are in fact innocent of murders.

It's not that I would ever do these things, or condone them, in any sense, it's just that sometimes, events in the international arena of news sometimes make you so upset that you do get to that point. You do get that level of intense anger, terror, despair about your species, cynicism, a thirst for vengeance. It can be (and sometimes has been) so overwhelming that it scares you. It scares even me how much of that emotion I have sometimes.

This is not the first time I have given issues of an international scope much thought. I came of age, spent my preteens and teens, in a world shadowed by the spector of terrorism. On the morning 9/11 occurred, I was 11 years old, overwhelmed at starting the 6th grade. So it isn't like I've had much choice in what I've become aware of. In past decades, like the 80's or 90's, you could get away with having little or no opinion in international strife and conflicts, because it didn't have a tangible effect on people's lives here in the US. On that Tuesday morning in September 2001, that perception ended abruptly and shockingly.

Since that day, I've felt like there has been a progressively more urgent nature to what happens to people in other countries. So this issue has been on my mind a lot over the years, even though I am still very young. Since I came across this information on Daniel Pearl, I was looking for a way, in my art, to deal with it. I know that won't have an effect, but it will help me express how I feel about this whole issue. Hopefully, just my sharing it with you will have some small effect.

On the one hand, as I said, I do have that anger and fear, but on the other, I do care about other nations, countries and cultures. I want to protect the people of America and the West, but I also don't want to see people on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, shredded, incinerated, then written off as "collateral damage." Sadly, a flipside of our American optimism is this our blindness to the damage our foreign policies, and wars, can cause. If we are an exceptional country, surely we could never kill someone who didn't deserve it. So I get that there are bad people abroad, but I also think we need to take a look at our own soul.

For a while, I racked my brain to try to come up with a way to express this. The phrase "terrorism hurts everybody" went through my mind, but I wanted to come up with a picture that represented it. That is how I express what I find through art best. I wanted to draw up an image that got at the universality of having life ripped from someone you care about. I got the idea to do this drawing.

I was inspired to do this from the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. On the night of December 21, 1988, the plane, Pan Am 103, was blown up as it was heading from London to New York City. Everybody on the plane (259 people) was killed horrifically, and when the plane hit the ground, it destroyed several houses in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 11 people in Lockerbie were killed. The attack was carried out by two Libyan Intelligence agents, one of whom was imprisoned, later released and returned to Libya. There is also good evidence, from official sources, that it was planned within the Libyan government.

Again, the horrible, terrifying way those people were ripped from their lives is gut wrenching. Hearing of it makes it all the more distressing that the perpetrators "got away" and one was sent back home. Again, I had dark thoughts about what I would like do to inflict pain on the people resposible, only to try to take them back soon after. In one account I read, they reported that some christmas presents that the plane was carrying back to the US lay smashed in Lockerbie. That heartbreaking image really stuck with me.

So I decided to make this image as broadly applicable as I could. I wanted it to be about the feeling of a loved one ripped from life. Just the shock, horror, and pain, is something that unites us all. I decided to make this a jarring image of the keychain of a close love falling out of the side of the plane into the darkness. I included the jettisoned christmas present alongside it. This makes it about what terrorism really costs us: people we love, care about, or know. People who don't deserve to be a victim of political or religious hostility. Thus, it applies beyond just the bombing of Flight 103, or terrorism from the Middle East.

It becomes about us all. What do we lose from terrorism? We lose fellow human beings, we lose humanity. By the way, the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are themselves Muslims. 30 of the victims of September 11th (a full 1% of them) were Muslims, including people on the flights to Los Angeles, and Firefighters, Police Officers, and Paramedics in New York.

Listen to this beautiful video, done by Queen Rania of Jordan, about victims of terrorism who live in the Middle East and pratice Islam.

This inspired me to make this more of a universal statement. That's where I came up with the statement "Terrorism Hurts Everybody." While focusing on this "clash of civilizations" that has claimed many lives, we lose sight of those things in common that give us our humanity. We need, therefore, to reclaim this sense of common experience across borders or cultures. We need to understand that when one act of violence is carried out, someone always suffers, lives with pain for weeks, months, years afterward.

To return to my starting point, Daniel Pearl was killed because he was doing his job. He was doing his work one day, and then he got killed in this horrible way. The same could be said of nearly all other victims of contemporary terrorism. It's just that his job was to highlight goings-on in the world few of us ever encounter. His job may be one of the most crucial in this world.

Thankfully, his death was not for nothing. Now our world is getting more and more interconnected, in an economic sense, in a communal sense, in a cultural sense, in an ethical sense. This is made possible by technology like the laptop I am using right now, and the IPhone I currently own. What is diclosed in Washington DC, can now be passed on to journalists in Europe, and can launch an uprising in the Middle East.

The good thing about this interconnectedness is that it makes it much harder for us to kill indiscriminately. At the same time that technology is bringing us farther apart, it is bringing us closer together. Now our humanity is being brought to bear, as cultures around the world are not as far apart as they used to be. I do not believe this is the end-all-be-all of what needs to happen on Earth, but I do think this is the beginning. The beginning of a journey that needs to happen.

Well, more on the subject of 9/11 in the next post. I was thrilled to finally get to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last Saturday night. I would have blogged about it sooner, but for the last few days, I have been tied up with homework, already, yes. I'll have that for you tomorrow.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!