Fourteen years ago, the United States suffered an unspeakable tragedy. Two planes were hijacked and crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, while another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and yet another crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, the hijackers’ plot thwarted by passengers aboard the plane. This day saw the most American lives lost in a single day, second only to the Battle of Antietam, in 1862, during the American Civil War. September 11, 2001, is a day that will always live in the memory of every American alive, as it marks a divide in modern history: There is a pre-9/11 America, and post-9/11 America. However, the United States’ response to this senseless day of violence has been to attack and brand as terrorists an entire demographic of innocent people being held responsible for the actions of a small group of extremists, leading to the manifestation and perpetuation of violence against people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent that has not abated to this day.
Following the attacks on 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and Osama bin Laden, the then-leader of al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for the attacks. The evidence that either of these goals could be achieved through the unethical invasion of two sovereign nations was very slim, but the U.S. followed through anyway. The result of this suspicious invasion? Over 100,000 people killed since 2003, and that’s just the Iraq war. There is no exact number of how many people were killed during the span of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, partially because the numbers change every day, but also because there are no real records kept of Iraqi and Afghani casualties, civilian or otherwise. What this invasion has done in the U.S. is develop a culture where anyone who has brown skin or looks vaguely Middle Eastern is profiled as a terrorist, and in many cases, faces incredible cases of violence, completely unwarranted.
Take Sureshbhai Patel, a 58-year old Indian man who, when walking outside of his son’s home in Alabama, was assaulted and paralyzed by police officers, who met him in the first place because someone in the neighborhood saw him walking and called 911. In all honesty, I do not see how this country can espouse equal rights for everyone when, clearly, if Mr. Patel had been a white man, this would not have happened. But because he is an Indian immigrant who can’t speak English, he is partially paralyzed and must deal with the issues that follow for the rest of his life, while the officer who so brutally beat him gets off scot-free on a mistrial.
The culture of violence in this country is appalling. The fact that police officers can paralyze a man and then not face any consequences is shocking (though that relates to a different story). The tragedy suffered on 9/11 was horrific, yes, but our response to it as a nation is shocking. How can anyone justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, many innocents? How is it possible to be callous enough to determine the worth of one human life over another? Why should an American life be worth more than an Iraqi or Afghani one? There is no denying that the loss of life on September 9, 2011, was wanton, senseless, and in every way wrong. But there is also no denying that the American response to this was in almost every way wrong too.
