So now Britain, joining Spain and the U.S., has had its 9-11 moment. A terrible tragedy and loss of life. I will heed the call and resist the temptation to assign blame; instead I will concentrate on cultivating compassion for all involved and offer good energy/will to the beleaguered Brits.
I can't resist saying something about media here. On 9-11-01, I was holed up in my mostly-media-deprived cave of a basement room in Washington DC. Back then I had a dial-up connection on a line shared with five other people, and so was not online very often. I didn't even hear about the attacks until that afternoon and since we didn't have a TV then, we had to go out to a bar to see those ubiquitous film clips of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.
Yesterday was a completely different situation. I heard about the London bombings early in the morning, while eating my breakfast. Barry, boyfriend to housemate Katy, gave me accounts while surfing on his laptop. I then went up to my desk and immediately went online. I mostly looked at blogs, which I didn't even know about four years ago. I also checked out sites like the Manchester Guardian, etc. I also listened to Amy Goodman's indispensable Democracy Now program.
This morning, I saw the pictures in the paper taken by Brits using cell-phone cameras. Cell phones also played a part in the rescue efforts on 9-11, but there weren't many (if any) camera cell phones back then. Maybe that's a good thing, if the disturbing pictures from yesterday's events are any indication.
So, technological advances, even in the past four years, have made suffering more tangible, even visceral, in offering multimedia coverage, accessible from computers. Compassion has become more globalized, but then so has sadism. There is no doubt that, as the Washington Post reported today, terrorist organizing has become globalized through computer and telecommunications technology. The internet has become a key tool in "grassroots" terror-cell building.
It is probably much too optimistic to hope that those operating out of a cretinous ideology and worldview might be reformed by the use of globalized technology, the very emblem of modernity. Right now they're using that technology to propagate their cretinism. But shutting down world communications is not really an option. In fact, it's exactly what these terrorists would like. Anything to paralyze the so-called West.
I suppose the only idea I can offer is that people of goodwill, of nonviolent and compassionate intentions, continue to use those same tools and technology to create a space where alternatives may be envisioned and practiced. Paraphrasing Proudhon, let us build a new society in the circuits of the old.
Posted by jeb at July 8, 2005 2:28 PM | TrackBack