More than three years after September 11th, 2001, I continue to be affected in one minor way. I cannot go more than 6 or 7 hours without checking CNN.com to see if something horrible is happening to our country. I often must check CNN before I check my email, before I go to the bathroom, before I take my shoes off. Unthinkingly I open that browser and click on my bookmark, not realizing I’ve done so until I see the assortment of headlines. Terrorism has personally harmed me almost imperceptibly–but then again maybe not. Maybe my security and naïve hope were the victims. Before 9/11, the world I heard about in the news was a world of the European Union and Asian Tigers. Even Russia was becoming democratic and emerging from crippling corruption. Afterwards, I looked out and saw the other side of that happy tale, I saw the rest of the world, and that’s what I’m so frightened about.
The causes of terrorism: poverty, hopelessness, misunderstanding and ignorance are exploding across the developing world. Africa has an entire generation (20 million at least) of AIDS orphans–children without parents, without family to ground them–who face an extremely bleak future. They will ask why America had the drugs to help their dead mothers but refused to surrender the patents so that those drugs could me made cheaply and distributed widely. When Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world partially disappears under the ever-rising Bay of Bengal, its hundred million citizens will look to America’s prodigious output of CO2 (like 35% of the industrialized nation’s combined emission) and our flagrant rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. They will demand to know why we couldn’t curb our consumption to prevent their entire lives from being buried under melted glacial water. But overshadowing all other concerns is a massive world population that will destabilize entire continents as warming temperatures make crop yields uncertain, droughts more frequent and storms more deadly.
Terrorism is an enemy borne of despair that stands to become only more powerful, and we are isolating ourselves while no time in the history of the world has international cooperation been so absolutely necessary. The few thousand Islamic terrorists are nothing compared to the motherless, displaced, hungry and desperate millions who will look at our prosperity with an envious anger. Only a focused international effort to bring help to those affected by AIDS, curb all greenhouse gas consumption (not just developed world), stop population growth, provide debt relief to the developing world, and encourage open discussion between Western and Islamic leaders can hope to divert these otherwise unstoppable forces of chaos. I guess check CNN because the world has suddenly become a scary place, and we are headed down a path that leaves us all alone, where the very actions we take to make us safe may endanger us even more.
