LESSONS NOT LEARNED FROM 9/11

On this twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was tempted to put up a blog post called "What We Learned From 9/11" and follow the title with a couple blank pages.

But that goes for most events in human life: Nothing of importance is ever learned as a result of surviving some crucial moment.

See, humans don't learn stuff.

We don't have to. We already know everything.

(Or so we think, anyway.)

So, what should we have learned from 9/11? Two things:

First: For some time now the US has operated around the world in a way that benefits us, both financially and politically. No surprise there. And it's not just us. For centuries, most western countries have reached out across the globe in quest of economic gain. They call their little foreign footholds colonies.

It's getting harder to do, though. The natives are getting wise. They want a bigger cut of the action. Maybe they want all of it, naive people clinging to the notion they actually own the stuff.

For years the US rattled around the Middle East in an arrogant and greedy fashion, and our aggressive behavior has not gone unnoticed by the folks who live in places where we seek to liberate the natural resources.

(Mostly oil.)

These folks often take it personally.

And when the agitated country is packed squeaky tight with deeply religious critters, the inhabitants tend to take our harmless meddling as a assault on their religion.

Muslims, especially, seem touchy on the subject. They conjure up a need to defend their faith, to fight back, even against the Big Dog.

High-handed adventures perpetrated by the US, like reinstalling the Shah in Iran (which took two trumped-up "insurrections" to make stick), led directly to events of asymmetrical warfare, the sort of stuff we like to call "terrorism." (Because it suggests the attacks have come out of the blue, without rhyme or reason.)

To some extent, then, American policy triggered the events of 9/11.

Nobody over here wants to acknowledge this annoying fact, which means that in so far as it's a lesson, we will always fail to learn it.

For instance: We reacted to 9/11 by invading two Muslim countries, as if that would ever lead to a lessening of tensions. Before 9/11, folks in the Middle East claimed we were in a war against Islam. That forced them to attack us.

We responded by proving them right.

(As far as they know. Remember, they're humans, too, and just as mentally defective.)

Second item not learned: As I mentioned, our grim new enemies are deeply religious folks. They fight even harder against what they see as specifically anti-Muslim actions. The lesson we have failed to learn (or even notice) is that being deeply religious is never a good thing.

(See, now I'm attacking your religion, whatever it might turn out to be.)

Humans are precisely goofy enough to accord religion a highly respectable position in society. There's even a saying: A man never stands so tall as when he gets down on his knees to worship God.

This is rank nonsense, of course.

Religious thought is not only ridiculous, it's bizarrely ridiculous.

That is a statement nobody would object to, as long as the religion in question is not his own personal faith. His guys are all right; it's those other a-holes who cause all the trouble.

Tens of thousands of years of human nonsense and hundreds of "gods" later, there is still only one true statement you can make about God:

Nobody knows anything about God.

You don't know if he exists or not, or should he happen to exist, you have no idea what his (or her) defining qualities might be.

Protector? Punishing monster? Clueless wanker?

All you "know" is what your parents told you when you were a kid. And you can teach a kid anything. The little buggers are completely helpless, mentally.

(As are their parents, it turns out.)

Deeply religious people have little constraint. They know what they have to do, and they do it. In fact, doing what they do absolutely reinforces the divine mandate to do it.

A few days after the fall of the Twin Towers, a Muslim cleric went on TV to explain that those buildings could not have come down unless God wanted them to come down. Because everything is God's will.

Isn't that comforting?

To recap on 9/11: The attacks didn't come out of the blue; we made them happen (the attacker would surely say). And religion, deeply held, unquestioned religion, was the fuel that powered the attackers' flight.

If we could learn to stop pissing folks off, that would be good.

If we could learn to knock religion off its unearned pedestal, that would save lives in many ways.

Like, maybe a girl could learn to read in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.