Remembering 9/11

I've written about 9/11 before on this blog --

my entry called Blood Red Pants documents my own personal memory

of that day.

I don't really want to say too much about it,

yet I want to acknowledge the anniversary.

Because, quite frankly,

we can't forget history --

history is our story

and the story

of the last ten years has been the history

we have written in the wake

of that horrible day --

We do have the power to change this story

if we guide the pen

with no ego,

with no evil,

with a full understanding that history

can and will repeat itself

if we let it.

The best tribute I've heard to 9/11 is Judy Collins' Kingdom Come --

I've posted it before.

I'll do it again.

Thank you Judy,

and may the souls of those who died on 9/11/01

and those who have died

in the decade since,

sacrificed for the sake of 9/11,

rest

in peace.

Toddlers, Tiaras, and 9/11

Well, I'll tell ya' what --

Even though I,

as a 437 year old woman,

was born during the Renaissance,

right now, I feel

like I was born in the Dark Ages.

Tonight,

while I was looking for the Public Television Channel,

I stumbled onto another channel instead --

TLC.

Now, I have to tell you --

I don't watch my television much.

People who watch TV a lot

know where their PBS Channel is,

especially if it's what they want to watch,

and they also know where TLC is,

and they probably know what their programming is like.

I know neither because, well,
I don't watch TV.  Instead I practice
this rather arcane past-time called reading
and I write a hell of a lot;

when I do watch TV, I always have to look

for the right channels,

and I sometimes end up watching something

I never intended to watch,

simply because it's so stunning -- sometimes stunningly awe-ful --

Tonight I was looking for a show 9/11 and faith & doubt on PBS, 

and instead, I came upon 

Toddlers and Tiaras.

Now I realize most of the television-watching world

knows about this show,

and I know

some of the members of the television-watching world

actually thin that beauty pageants are good

for four year olds.

But honestly,

dear Pageant Mom,

if you've come upon my blog,

and you if you think I'm going to applaud you,

you'd better find another blog to read

right now.
Because I'm going to make you kind of angry.

I cannot, under any circumstances

applaud this:

I can only be appalled by it.

When I started to watch it,
or several minutes, I thought it was a news program like 60 Minutes
covering some scandalous crime against children,
and then, when I started looking for more about the topic on YouTube,
I realized that I was watching an actual TV show about children's pageants,
that has been on for years.  It's a show with followers,
and some of the girls on the show
have become stars.

The more episodes of this I watched,

the more I decided the creators of this program are brilliant,
in a very sick way.  They are pulling a two-way scam
designed to manipulate the minds of a vast number of viewers with only one goal in mind:
to make money.

First, they've creating a show where parents who think

that it would be just grand

to have a child in a pageant,

can watch and affirm that what they want 

is just a fine family past-time:

while at the same time this is a show 

for folks to rip apart; 

it's a show for parents who need to convince themselves 

that even though they really have made mistakes as parents

they are not that bad;

after all, they would never do that:  

In some cases,

the actions of the parents are so outrageous,

that I can't help but wonder if they're acting from a script.

No one could do anything like this

if they really cared about their children --

Furthermore, the show has created a totally new subject for talk television ~ ~



~ ~ ~ and honestly, it doesn't take a great intellect,
it doesn't even take additional reading,
to agree that these parents are abusing their children.

It's a fabulous way, in the end, to entertain a large part
of the American population,
without asking them to think too hard.
And people obviously do watch it, every week.


And meanwhile,
some of us commemorate 9/11,
and we continue to wonder
how it could have happened to us,

It was easy -- the USA was looking the other way,
when it was attacked 10 years ago.

And it still is.

We need to see and remember;
we need to know the true reasons it happened,
and we truly do need to educate our vast population
that continues
to look the other way.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Blood Red Pants

(from Google search page, thanks.)

*

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

My summer with family in the States.

Only a week previous,

We had celebrated my youngest brother’s wedding

In New York City.

With our new-found family members
(my sister-in-law’s Greek family,

The kind generous people

Who welcomed me so warmly

This past summer)

We had taken the Circle Line Cruise

And enjoyed the Manhattan skyline,

Complete with

Twin Towers.

( photo by Makropoulos )

What a happy day that had been for me,

To be with my whole family,

In New York City,

One of my favorite cities

In the world.

I had lived three and a half very happy years

In that city

While I completed coursework

For my Ph.D., and

I had my own relationship with the

World Trade Center:

One summer I had done temp work in one of the Towers,

For a month or so

On around the 64^th floor,

In a bustling stock trading office.

I don’t remember the name of the place.

But I remember the people,

All frenetic, some struggling

To find a human moment

In the bustle of the day.

I remember being amused

By the high-stakes game they were playing,

But only really wanting to watch.

I knew that if I tried to participate,

I’d probably destroy something,

Like somebody’s

Fragile fortune.

I remember my lunch breaks, too,

Sitting out in the heat,

Under the creaking,

Looming

Monoliths,

Eating my simple sandwich

Every now and then wishing

One of the besuited men

Would take a shine to me

And invite me to lunch.

(But I was newly married then, so I played it safe,

wearing non-descript cotton

dresses

and hose.

In the heat,

That’s right.

I wore hose.)

My other memory of the Towers

Was a daily one:

I would step out of my

East 9^th Street apartment building

And head West

To my classes.

Crossing 1^st Avenue, I could look down

And see them in the distance.

They became my beacon,

My guide,

My reminder that I was headed

In the right direction.

It was very hard to live in New York City

And not have a relationship

With the

Twin Towers.

( guardianchronicle )

* *

( alibaba)

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

Shopping

In the streets of Ankara.

I loved the new red pants

I had bought

That hugged me

Like hose.

But as pants,

They were far more sexy

Than hose.

Blood red pants.

I still have them.

I came into my apartment,

Turned on my TV,

Always set

On CNN,

And

Without looking,

Went to the bedroom

And put on my

Blood red pants.

(photo by Makropoulos)

They were very sweet,

Indeed,

And made me smitten

With my own ass.

Returning to the other room,

I saw it:

My lovely city

New York

An aerial view

An airplane flying

Low

And colliding

With a Tower.

Like so many others,

I thought it was a hoax at first,

But then,

I saw the next plane.

When the first Tower

Crumbled,

I too

Crumbled

To the ground,

Sobbing,

And suddenly

Very alone, and very frightened.

I could see very clearly

How the massive

American Ship of State

Now had a gaping hole

Torn right into its water line,

And all I could think was:

Now all the passengers,

Those US Citizens,

 on board that massive

Ship of State that they thought

Was the Love Boat

Have a clear view of the rest of the world.

What will they see?

They could, if they dared, see very clearly

The position America had come to assume

In the rest of the world.

They could, indeed, if they dared, look closely

At the now imperiled vessel

In which they had blissfully

Floated for nearly a century

And recognize

That it was not the Love Boat after all,

But rather,

A Battleship.

And they could apologize and get on with mending their wounds,

Everyone’s wounds.

Or

They could get really pissed

And fight back

And keep pretending they are on the

Love Boat

When in fact the more they fought

(the more they fight)

The more the rest of the world

Would see their concealed weapons

More clearly,

And watch how frantic they would all become

As the still damaged

Ship-Of-The-American-State

Began (and begins) to slowly sink

Into

The Sea of History.

Seriously,

That’s what I thought.

Sometimes my brain

Waxes quite poetically.

If you haven't noticed by now.

* * *

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

The U.S.A.

I had brought some gifts

For my building’s

Kapacı,
(door man, building manager, maintenance man)

A lovely always-smiling man

Named

Salaam.

Which, by the way,

Means “peace”

If you didn’t know that.

It’s often part of a greeting.

I had bought with me a bag full of gifts

For his children,

And he had been so shocked

When I handed them to him.

(In my then very modest Turkish,

I had asked him,

before I left,

how many children he had,

or I thought I asked him that.

After a confused expression, he answered
“altı” – six

So I had brought back a bag full of

Six little stuffed animals.

I later learned he had two

Children,

And the oldest was

Six, and the question I had posed

Was actually

“How old is your child?”)

Salaam was always smiling at the door of the building,

Or working in the grounds, making them a fabulous garden.

His beautiful wife

Aylın

Would bring me homemade food
when she had extra.

After the events of 9/11/2001,

Salaam brought me flowers,

And wished me and my country
a quick healing.

People in my building who I did not know

Stopped me in the elevator and on the stairs,

And said they were deeply sorry

For the attack on the

Twin Towers.

That was not, they said,

The true Islam.

Within the year that followed,

When my apartment was broken into

Salaam took personal responsibility for it,

And did all he could to make the building secure.

My neighbors paid to have my door fixed;

They gave me money and food until

I could stabilize myself.

In my independent American Way,

I was embarrassed
and told them
they didn't have to do that.

But a neighbor explained to me

That the moment I moved into their building,

I became a member of their family,

Their community,

And they felt it was their duty

To help and protect me.

It was, this woman said,

The Turkish way,

The True Islamic way,

Not like what happened in New York

On 9/11/2001.

( brewed coffee )

It is 9/11/2010,

And I live in America.

And somewhere

In Florida,

A preacher,

A religious man

A man whose job it is to train his people

Ethically

About the true nature of God,

And the Peaceful,

Forgiving,

Self-Effacing

Teachings of Jesus Christ

Has threatened to  burn

The Koran –

And I say to you

That man is Not a True Christian.

He should go move

Into a working class apartment complex

In a Muslim country

And see

What a true Christian 
Is supposed to act like.
 

Jesus and Representations

1.

I really love the idea

of Jesus.

(from spiritlessons )

If you do a Google search on "pictures of Jesus" it's amazing how many results you can get.  All for a guy who lived during a time when they didn't have cameras. 

This picture was in my grandmother's house, during the 1960s;

it's so soothing and passionate.  

One of the reasons I love the idea of Jesus.

2.

We don't have pictures of Jesus, but we have accounts of how he acted.  We have stories.

Stories give us the pictures

the remembrances

of events where we forgot our camera.

Kind of like the Book of Genesis:

and other Creation Stories -

they're attempts to capture 

the impressions of a really important event

when God forgot his camera.

Stories are really important,

because

each little word

is like a snapshot

of a gesture,

and expression,

an act.

3.

The word - Jesus - is a representation.

I love the idea of Jesus for what he represents: 

peaceful solutions

compassion

forgiveness

a rejection of the 

Old Testament philosophy of 

an eye for an eye:

turning the other cheek.

*

When 9/11 happened, I was in

Ankara, Turkey,

and as I watched the towers tumble,

I thought:

this is the equivalent

of the hole that was blasted

into the side of the 

U.S.S.Cole -

How would my nation

respond to this

provocation?

I was afraid.

*

In March of 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq,

I was in Ankara, Turkey.

On the night of the invasion,

I was sitting in a bar with a couple Turkish friends,

and I was in total despair.

This was the answer I feared the United States would give.

My friends and I were talking about

America;

we were talking about the 

Christian world and the Muslim world.

I said to my friend Onur:

what do you think would have been the best way for America to respond to the attack of 2001?

And he said:

Enact, purely, the teachings of Jesus.

Turn the other cheek.

No self-respecting Muslim could attack

a nation that opted to practice

an act of pure love.

Furthermore,

the radical Islamic sects

would not have the sympathy and/or support

of the Islamic world if they continued to attack after we simply

turned the other cheek.

*

Of course, that's not what we did.

And any arguments about the voracity of my friend's claim

would be purely academic.

*

At the time, 

I agreed with Onur;

today,

I still agree

with what Onur 

proposed.

This is not to say we would have avoided war;

(we were already in a war,

it's just that, 

on 9/11

Americans was made aware of the fact

that we were

at war)

we just would have avoided the kind of war

that we've been having.

4.

A stumbling point

between the world of Islam

and the world of Christianity

is, of course,

Jesus.

We both share him, by the way.

Jesus

is in the Koran,

and Mary his Mother 

is the only woman who is named

in the Koran,

for the very simple reason that

men in the Koran are identified by their father's name --

Ishmael and Iaac, sons of Abraham, for instance --

but Jesus has no father,

so he's identified by

his mother's name.

Which leads us to the rather troubling question

of who his father is.

Christianity teaches

Jesus is the son of God, 

and somehow that blurs into him being

God.

Islam says there's no way

he could be God;

God is God,

and Jesus

was a great prophet.

I've also read and heard the argument

from Muslims that, if God is everything,

why would he want or need a son?

Well, hey, if God is everything,

why the heck

would he have wanted to create

us?

He created us

and everything we occupy

in his own likeness,

and then, well,

we kind of made a mistake.

It's been our job ever since, to correct that mistake.
I tend to believe that
every now and then
some human takes form
who has a really big clue
about how to correct that mistake.

(Please see my earlier contemplations on the creation & the fall; and the second coming)

One thing that is remarkable

about reading the Koran

is that it actually presupposes that its readers

have also read the Old and New Testament.

It talks about the Creation,

and some major figures in the Old and New Testaments

as if the reader already knows about them,

therefore leading one to believe that

the best way to read the Koran

and the Bible

is together.

One of the great sins of each

of the Abrahamic religions

is that we don't read

each others books:

Muslims generally don't read the Bible,

and Jews and Christians

rarely read the Koran.

However, put those books together

and there's a very interesting story that emerges,

and its central idea is this:

Jesus belongs to all of us.

5.

Christ is the population of the world,

and every object as well.  There is no room

for hypocrisy.  Why use bitter soup for healing

when sweet water is everywhere?

(Jelaluddin Rumi)

5.

Late at night, when I've been writing on this blog,

I start looking at other people's blogs.

If I simply move through

blogger, I find

that my neighboring blogs

are often

lovely family blogs

with really lovely pictures

of lovely families,

or 

Christian blogs,

with really lovely pictures

of Christian families,

and I really like seeing them.

Occasionally, though,

I find a nut case like me.

I know that most people

in the United States

would say my ideas about Jesus

are blasphemous,

but they're not,

just like

my ideas about the United States

are not blasphemous:

I deeply love

what both the U.S.A. and Jesus

represent,

and I mourn

what the two, combined,

have become.

Living Off The Grid

If you take the time to read my wordy first entries on this blog, you'll see the story of my Grid message.  Some might say it was just a dream, but if it was just a dream, it was a very odd one. For the sake of those readers (if there are any) who don't want to read my earliest ramblings, the message I received in a dream was this: Jesus will come as the scholar in the four days of the Grid.   I woke up and wrote it in my journal.  Alongside of that sentence, I also wrote: The Age of the Grid?  Then I went back to sleep, hoping for more news.  I got none.

Five and a half years ago, right after receiving that message, I did a Google search on the term "The Age of the Grid," and it yielded only a couple pages, and they all were about Grid Computing.  Today, a Google search on especially the phrase the "Age of the Grid" will yield pages and pages.  The idea of The Grid is cliche now, and there are now even people talking about living off the Grid.

I fully understand why someone might want to live off the Grid.  A London Times story online points out that this is part of a compulsion to avoid surveillance.  There's actually an entire website called Offgrid.com 

It strikes me as both odd and ominous that in the short period of time between my receiving my dream-message, and the present day, the idea of The Grid has gone from being a fairly rarified geek notion to being part of the daily lexicon.

I imagine that someone reading about this message would be alarmed, if only for my sanity.  Fundamentalist Christians might ask: "what should we do to prepare for the Coming of Jesus?"  My answer to that is simple:  act likes he's coming today.

And that gets to the true reason for this posting.  For me, the most compelling question is when?  When are the Four Days of the Grid?  What are the Ages of the Grid, and when is the Fourth?  It appears, quite clearly, that we are currently well beyond the First Age of the Grid, if in fact people are considering living off of it.

Those who seek to live off of it seek to avoid surveillance.  They seek to be spared the tyranny of an Orwellian nightmare.  And I understand that fully.  But my question right now is: at what cost?

Any technology is a tool, and tools can be used for both good and not-so-good ends.  As I have said elsewhere, just as a hammer extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the hand, computers and the internet (which is the DNA of The Grid) is that technology that extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the human mind.  I'm not the only person to make this claim. 

One can both kill and build with a hammer, and so too is the case with the internet, and computers. 

But just because someone can kill with a hammer (indeed, here is a most disturbing video of some young men in the Ukraine killing someone with a hammer and a screwdriver.  Please do not follow this link if you have a weak stomach. I could not watch the whole video) does that mean we should start "living off the hammer"?  No, I'll bet even people who are living off the grid have hammers.  They may even have guns, which are far more lethal extensions of the arm, and the hand, and the fist, then a hammer.

Indeed, even Jesus used a hammer, if we are to believe the stories we've been told about him.

This is why I am disturbed that people would opt to live off of the Grid, when it's very likely that the Grid has as much potential to build something good as a hammer does.  It all depends on how you use it.

At its most basic level, the strength of The Grid is its ability to create a mass, communal mind that can work very quickly and collaboratively to produce some kind of meaningful end.  What's at risk, of course, is individuality.  What is to gain is the survival of humanity.

Let's consider two cases, one where the Grid was used for evil ends, and one for good ends.

The first case has almost become a cliche, that being the horrible incidents of 9/11/2001.  It continues to intrigue and boggle my mind that a relatively small group of terrorists was able to do something that no nation has been capable of doing: attack the United States on their home turf.  And how was that group able to do that?  They used The Grid.  They used the internet, telephones, and any number of other technologies that allowed them to produce a collaborative effort that far extended any one individual's abilities.  And frighteningly, they succeeded.

They will continue to succeed.  The U.S. government's attempts to pursue individual terrorists, and to frisk innocent passengers en masse come no where near touching the apparatus that binds a breed of terrorist who really doesn't care about individual fame.  Lone Christmas day bombers, or single men trying to light their shoes are decoys, designed to keep our attention away from a plot far greater than the attack on the Twin Towers that is no doubt being planned as I type, and is using the same technology to disseminate its messages.  When or where the next true attack will occur, I really don't know.  I am, after all, just a slowly aging diva with an overactive mind.

Efforts have been made to use this same networking power for positive ends, but they're not always as successful.  Still, those efforts are kind of wonderful in their own ways, hinting at the power this technology can hold for us.  Consider this:  a few years ago, I heard the story of a missing computer scientist, a man named Jim Gray.  He had taken his sailboat out onto the Pacific, and disappeared.

According to Wikipedia, Jim Gray "was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."  His colleagues decided to try to use the very technology he was so instrumental in developing to try to find him.  They initiated a search of the waters he was believed to be lost in, via the very accessible and user-friendly Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Again, I'll quote Wikipedia's definition of what the Mechanical Turk is:  "one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

The keywords in this definition are "co-ordinate the use of human intelligence."  Yes, therein lies the power of The Grid.

For a few weeks, anyone with a little extra time who was willing to subscribe to the Mechanical Turk could search a sector of the sea, presented through images captured via satellite, for anything that looked like an overturned boat or debris, or perhaps the actual boat itself.  Detailed instructions were given on what to look for.  I know, because I did a few myself, hoping that I might be the one to spot a sail, or an overturned hull, or some other little clue of what happened to the missing man.

No one found Jim Gray.  But part of his legacy is that his final search attempted to utilize the combined strengths of multiple human minds in a way that his own research helped to make possible. 

This story is both beautiful and absolutely misguided.  I was fascinated by it, because it allowed me to become part of a project that was bigger than myself, and that, ultimately, had very little to do with me.  However, it was designed, ultimately, to serve one man, and - if I remember correctly - there may have been a reward to the individual who found the spot where Jim met his fate.  Lovely idea; however, this is not, in the end, how this tool should be used.  The internet is not designed for the benefit of any one individual.  It is the most perfectly democratic medium and technology.  And in a perfect democracy, all men and women are created equal, and work together for the communal good. 

And that is how the internet - The Grid - can be used positively.

If people with good intentions - intentions fueled by the true teachings of a man named Jesus - were to use this tool for humane ends, Jesus would come again, and he would come again as The Scholar - the communal mind of humankind. 

But as of right now, it's true, the only efforts that have truly used the power of The Grid to successful ends are terrorists, misguided governments, and big business.  And ultimately, they're all one in the same, and they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything like a Jesus.  It is really up to us - and that includes those poor misguided individuals fumbling around, trying to light fires "off the grid" who fundamentally do have good intentions.  Living off the grid must be done in ways that also maintain grid-based communal cooperation, especially if the true intent of the off-gridders is to maintain human life on the planet.