Agreed. I didn’t hear about the Spanish train attack and think, “There! You evil Spaniards, now you feel our pain!!!”
What an odd emotion to have.
I was nowhere near there on that day, but spent my late twenties in that area. It was full of real people. People bringing their kids to daycare, shopping at Century 21, getting lunch, streaming through the concourse to the E-Train. To think of them dying in fear and pain like that is NOT fun and never was.
This is simply stupid. Do you actually think that New York, DC and Virginia had a shortage of firefighters and medical personnel at that time? There was no shortage, and there were tens of thousands of qualified volunteers a hell of a lot closer than Spain. Disasters often provoke offers of help which are refused for practical, logistical reasons. It’s not an insult.
I think Nava is really talking about the OTT reaction from a lot of people Stateside to the attacks. Yes it was a huge attack and devastating to NY but attacks by terrorists are nothing new over here and we kinda look at them with a bit more black humour involved.
For Example, on 9/13I laughed when a colleague told me about her experience in Florida on 9/12. She was with a American who knew her well and was freaking out. The American was desperately trying to explain to my colleague how much fear she had about another attack. This was in Florida BTW and the person was personally terrified. When my colleague tried to calm her down she was told that she just didn’t understand anything about terrorism or the fear that went with it.
My colleague is from Belfast and lived there for 40 years.
I also told an American living in Dublin to chill the fuck out on 9/14 when they told me that it was the first time the had left their apartment since the attack as he feared to walk the street for fear of attack. In Dublin!
Don’t get me wrong BTW, six years ago today I was standing in my work reception with about 100 other people crying looking at the towers fall and feeling for you guys in a big way. Some did kinda lose it though and it is those that Nava seems to be talking about.
Bad show and a bit naive thinking that you could get away with being flippant in a 9/11 anniversary thread on a US board though.
Raise your hand if you thought **Nava **was gonna come here and apoligize for posting a poorly worded statement. ::raises hand::
Now raise your hand if you thought** Nava** was going to defend her statement. 
This probably won’t change my impression of her in the long run, but for now I’m just, um, not getting it.
AS an American, I felt the same way. I was busy mourning for the deaths of actual people, and going through a bizarre emotional connection with total strangers (that I wrote about in the linked thread) but at the same time listening to the evening news and the wailing and gnashing of teeth and no airplanes flying and long, long securty lines and metal detectors being wheeled in to office buildings and elementary schools in Poduck Indiana making “Terrorist Threat Plans” and thinking, “Well, yeah, this sucks and all, but other people in other countries have this happen to them every week, and they get on with life without this level of paranoia, don’t they?”
It made me feel, not less compassion for Americans, but more compassion and greater identification with other people who had been through similar things. But yeah, I sort of did feel we “had it coming” in a karmic sort of way. What was surprising at the time seemed inevitable in retrospect.
I keep reading **Nava’s ** post in that other thread and then reading the responses here, and trying to reconcile that it’s just a bad choice of words, but I’m not getting that at all.
I’m getting bitter and somehow happy that thousands of people lost their lives.
If Europe’s full of people that were smug about it finally happening here - they’re ignorant and blind, because I can think of at least two previous, major terrorist attacks on buildings prior to 911.
If Europe’s been attacked and seen more violence than we have here, I’d say that speaks a little better of our own security and defense. Is that reason to be smug, or to laugh at the sight of people dying.
Fuck no.
She’s talking about watching “Americans running around like headless chickens” and calling it “fun”.
And is it possible that our “overreaction” is due to the fact that we have not dealt with terrorism of this magnitude before? Yeah, a lot of us freaked because we didn’t know what, if anything would happen next. Give us a fucking break on that one, okay?
I can’t account for the ignorant folks you posted about in Dublin, but many Americans are aware of terrorism in other areas of the world.
Although I was safely out of Cuba on September 11, I am saddened to say that this exact reaction was what I heard from some friends in the island when I talked to them. I was especially saddened when I read that Hebe Bonafini, one of the Argentinian mothers who marched for years in protest for their sons dissapearances, and who was in Cuba at the time actually talking about celebrating the attacks.
Thankfully this attitude did not extend to Canada at the time.
I’m going to say something that will be unpopular:
Wow. I don’t really think any of you guys actually paid attention to what she’s saying. She said watching the towers fall hurt. She said her hearts went out to those people. She said she knows about the horror of terrorism because she grew up around it. She said she was not talking about people dying. Like way too many people are accusing her of, she was not making light of the death of innocent people.
She was laughing, horrified, and the incompetence in the aftermath. Just like many of us in the USA were doing here, remember? Not one American thought some of the actions of our government were a little ridiculous or over the top in the face of 9/11? Not one American responded to that horror with black humor? Apparently not. Apparently, if you say one bad thing about America in relation to 9/11, you’re a monster, and asshole, and we don’t need your kind here, you can all go home.
Have we learned nothing in the past 6 years?
Exactly. But are knee-jerk reactions here something new? People comprehend what they want to comprehend. Those that are jumping up and down in this thread throwing shitfits will never understand Nava’s point.
I can’t judge her for feeling that way as I didn’t grow up in her country in her shoes. But it might have been better not to have mentioned it in a remembrance thread.
Not really, because before 9/11 a lot of the terrorist attacks in Europe were from internal separatist groups, e.g., the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland and Basque separatists in Spain. That reflects the same sort of heightened political feeling that, within the US, led to the Civil War. It’s really hard to defend against an internal rebellion like that, because the participants were born inside the county and blend into the local population.
beanpod, since when are you her spokesperson? Is she paying you?
Lots and lots of people have made exactly those kinds of comments in lots and lots of 9/11 threads. I’ll bet you half the people in this thread have never said a word against them. I’d be one of them - you’ll never find me complaining someone was too harsh about 9/11.
But what shocked me was it was Nava, and that it was totally unnecessary - in a 9/11 remembrance thread. Tell me, what purpose did that exactly serve? And not one comment out of her mouth along the lines of “I’m sorry, that was insensitive. It may have been true, but it wasn’t the right place to say it.” But only justifications, justifications, justifications.
I hate knee-jerk reactions too, but I hate just as much when someone is convinced they’re right and won’t even try to see the other person’s POV - and to me the main one who is doing that is Nava.
Oh I didn’t expect to get away with it, I expected to open the gate to reactions other than “oh god it was horrible.”
It was, but it was also a lot more.
Excuse me, but what other country has seen such an act of terrorism? What other country has had four targets hit out of the clear blue sky? What other country has lost almost 3,000 innocent people and 500 police, firefighters, and emergency workers in 102 minutes? What other country has had all its flights cancelled? What other country has had to have its planes diverted to another country to land? In what other country do you see am empty space in a skyline and want to cry every single time?
Seems to me that one of those happened in Oklahoma City, by a member of an internal group.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t think I deserve such an angry response. I read the same posts you did, and got the same information you did. I chose to assume that another person might have a different perspective and not be an absolute monster.
I think her position is being misrepresented by people who frequent a board that prides itself on fighting ignorance, and I am disgusted.
Hiroshima? Dresden? Nagasaki?
Are those examples good enough?
So is there an agreed upon point sometime after the towers fell at which is it appropriate to criticize and/or mock US reactions including (but not limited to) security theater at airports and buildings, the Patriot Act, detentions at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the Homeland Security Agency, invading Iraq…?