September 11 to Remember

September 11 is a significant date to remember. Some remember it with mourning and grief. But some remember it with triumph. Others remember it as the first day of the rest of their lives.

The most recent memory of a September 11 event was the series of coordinated and well-planned attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001. That Tuesday morning attack, also often referred to as 9/11, surprised the world’s lone super-power. The world’s super cop was practically caught flatfooted. The account of what happened that fateful morning is now recorded in the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia.

Ninteen men, who were said to be from al-Qaeda, hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners, with each team including a trained pilot. Two planes (United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11) crashed into the World Trade Center, also known as the Twin Towers, in New York City, one plane into each tower. Within two hours, the towering symbols of America’s economic power collapsed.

The pilot of the third team crashed a plane into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth aircraft attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers. That plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Excluding the 19 hijackers, a confirmed 2,973 people died and another 24 remain listed as missing as a result of these attacks during which passenger jets, for the first time in history, were used as weapons.

The world, including the Philippines, mourned the attack because some of the casualties were Filipinos. But while others mourned, some of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world cheered the hijackers. For them, it was time for America, who invented the phrase “collateral damage” and who has been applying it on hapless people in some powerless Third World nations, to learn its lesson and to get some dose of the kind of medicine it has been prescribing for its own overt and covert wars.

Humiliated and outraged, America’s George W. Bush unleashed his rage on Afghanistan and, later, on Iraq. Afghanistan, which was said to be sheltering the al-Qaeda, was bombed and flattened and sent back to the Stone Age. The attack on Afghanistan exacted more “collateral damage” than the casualties of 9/11 in America. After Afghanistan, America’s Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair shifted to Iraq, which, they said, was concealing “weapons of mass destruction.” Both guys even got the UN’s approval for their war on Iraq. It turned out later, however, that the supposed weapons of mass destruction were weapons of mass deception and that the war on Iraq was about oil.

After 9/11, Bush wanted to count on his allies in the world for support on what he called the war on terror. Saying “either you are with us or against us,” he called on other leaders of the world to support that war. Among the first to respond to Mr. Bush’s call was Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who even offered the country’s ports as refueling stations for America’s warships if need be. Ms Arroyo’s support for Bush’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq made Arroyo, as one critic put it, “Washington’s little drummer girl in Asia.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Bush’s war on terror didn’t make the world safer. The war has endangered not only the US, but also its allies such as Spain, UK and the Philippines. There was the series of coordinated bombings against the commuter train system of Madrid on the morning of 11 March 2004, which killed 191 people and wounded over 1700. There were other bombings in retaliation to Mr Bush’s war on terror, exacting more collateral damage in Bali, Morocco, Istanbul and elsewhere.

Bush has tried to demonize Osama bin Laden, picturing him as a creature with horns and a thorny tail. But in many sidewalk shops in Bangkok, the portrait of a handsome bin Laden with the charisma of a Che Guevarra is painted on T-shirts for sale, along with other idols of some youth such as Bob Marley and, of course, Che Guevarra. So we are in a world where one person’s demon is another person’s legendary hero. And that is how the world has become after 9/11.

September 11, however, is remembered in a different light elsewhere. For some simple folk in far northern Philippines, whose lives revolve around sowing their seeds and reaping the fruits of their toil, September 11 is a day of hope. It was September 11, 2002 when the indigenous Mabaka folk of Apayao Province, for example, stopped living literally in the dark.

On the evening of that day, the Mabaka folk for the first time switched on their electric bulbs and bade goodbye to their kerosene lamps. Thanks to a 7.5 kilowatt-microhydro power plant, which a UN agency, a development NGO, and the Catholic Church supported. And thanks specially also to the determination and perseverance of Mabaka folk themselves. They had to haul on their shoulders iron bars, cement, pipes, and other materials and equipment from the nearest road because their home community of Buneg is a seven-to-eight-hour hike from the nearest road. All members of the community – men, women, and children – all coordinated to dig canals, haul stones and sand to help build their dream of seeing the light from Thomas Alva Edison’s invention.

Each September 11 since four years ago, the Mabaka folk would gather around their community in celebration to dance their traditional tadek to the tune of gongs as their way of thanking the heavens. So while the rest of the world’s peoples mourn 9/11, the Mabaka folk celebrate September 11 as that day when they have seen the light, both literally and from a much deeper sense.