To Forget or Not to ForgetHi. My name is Garrett. I’m currently a junior at Brown concentrating in IR, specifically under the Global Security track. As such, this course, I hope, will offer me a stronger sense of the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the field (or quasi-field) of study to which I’ve chosen to devote the majority of my time. Outside of IR, I’ve also nurtured a strong interest in the sciences, especially Physics and more recently Geology. I hope to come away from Brown as a student of International Relations, but one who can develop an understanding of the sciences and use it to inform my perspective on IR. I hope furthermore to be able to pry more deeply into questions in International Relations that require a scientific knowledge base, the two most evident to me on the Matrix being “Environment” and “Resource Conflict.” With Regards to 9/11, as a New Yorker I was in the not-so-common position of being in the City, in Manhattan, when the event took place. I recalled that morning that at some point I knew my father worked at 7 World Trade Center but I couldn’t discern, for a time, whether he still worked in the building at that time, and if so, whether he might be affected. It turned out that he had worked there years before, and besides a rather long hike up from the financial district, he was not burdened by the event. Fortunately, no one I knew personally was hurt or killed on that day; my closest connection was to an aunt of a classmate who I didn’t know very well. In any case, forgetting 9/11 is not an option for me or for my fellow New Yorkers. Despite images and experiences of the day have been permanently impinged on my memory, and that’s worth mentioning in the context of this discussion, I don’t much like the last paragraph I’ve written. It feels cliché, though it’s honest, and others could write and have more eloquently and effectively about the human experience of that day. In truth, I’m somewhat tired of thinking about and hearing about the sort of thing I’ve just written, and especially of seeing the images that were playing on the DVD menu in class, which I’ve seen and which have been conjured time and time again by our government to further actions that may or may not have any relation to those images and that day. But you already know this and now I’m just avoiding the question. My answer, as my answers tend to be when faced with the need to choose and take a stand, is to shoot for a middle ground and avoid answering strongly on either side. Having been in New York, I may have paradoxically forgotten the event more quickly than most. After a strong initial response, I don’t live in fear, per se, and I tend to resent the notion posed by politicians that I ought to. Than being said, 9/11 should be considered, as it has been, the most significant event and turning point in the American consciousness, as well as in the state of international affairs, in my time (having been too young to appreciate 1989). The awakening caused by the event is not one that I want to dismiss. We, indeed, must continue to deal with the challenge posed by the terrorism of 9/11, and focus a great deal of our resources and energy on it. But those resources are not unlimited. The awakening that I find more valuable in 9/11 than simply new attention paid to terrorism, is the sense that there are factors outside of the traditional state system, threats beyond that of traditional warfare, that have a real effect and must be reckoned with. They can be natural, entirely inhuman disasters, and they can be the force of one, to use one of Professor Der Derian’s favorite phrases, super-empowered individual; they can also lie anywhere along that spectrum. 9/11 was the first event of the post-Cold War world to fundamentally shake up and explode the uni-polar peace. It offered policy makers a new, though still quite vague, enemy to frame as the general opposition to American peace and security. It is time now, while still offering terrorism quite a deal of attention, to move past the desire to focus America’s energy on a “single” if still exceedingly complex source of threat, and begin to confront the full spectrum of issues that ought to have an impact on foreign policy. We should not forget 9/11, but instead should instead re-orient ourselves to the post 9/11 world, as it actually exists, and reevaluate the lessons we take from that supremely consequential event. Posted by Garrett Adler on September 17, 2007 05:14 PM | Permalink |
