September 11th, 2001 (in retrospect, in 2021)

this video is 100 inspired by my fellow youtuber and contemporary j.j mccullough it has become known on the internet that he and i talk every so often i i wouldn't call him a close personal friend we're on a first name basis but we're not on a middle name basis i don't know his middle name nor does he mind but yeah he and i have talked from time to time and i think it is completely inevitable that he is somewhat politically fascinated by me because i am simultaneously more left-wing and more right-wing than he is and i think that fascination is mutual in any case uh gg mccullough just made a video reflecting in a personal way on what was going on in his life in september 11 2001 how he first learned about the terrorist attacks uh september 11 2001 what it meant in his own life and you know to some extent for for planet earth from that perspective now i am significantly older uh than jj mccullough only okay all right i often don't feel that i'm any older than him uh but you know i'm now all 42 years old and my member of september 11th it's different for many reasons now this is something i think nobody in my audience appreciates but when september 11 2001 happened i was in a uniquely privileged position of having just finished about two years of study of the politics of the muslim world of the politics of the middle east broadly speaking um that does not make me an expert by any stretch the imagination but compared to the average white english-speaking canadian i was in the tiny minority of people who really knew the names of and knew the intellectual history of the leading terrorists of that period of time i knew the different factions those terrorists were divided up into and what had been happening in say the 20 or 30 years leading up to september 11 2001. i had read the quran in english i had read the hadith in english i had read the history of what's called islamic jurisprudence i had really read and thought about and written essays about written exams about the relationship between religion and politics in the muslim world and i'd spent a long time talking personally to the one unique professor and we did have something of a personal relationship you can still look him up on the internet today first name rameen last name jahan beglew now say this but my relationship with him you know he had talked to me about his divorce that he was very broken at that time but he was not at peace with it he was not detected detectively talking about his personal life he talked to me about the political struggles within uh the university department to define his life he never really spoke to me about his political relationship with iran but i got to see demonstrated right in front of my eyes just how visceral for him his position was within the islamic political world i got to see how he was when he was facing off with people who were more secular than he was and with people who were more muslim than he was people who were more westernizing than he was people who embraced basically assimilating into west culture and people who were opposed to that people who you know wanted them to take their own path and you know i first unconsciously and then quite consciously and cerebrally considered the possibility of devoting my life to the study of muslim politics and to be a kind of lobbyist if you like for the future of islam within canada and to affect the politics of the muslim world now i say that intentionally that it was say that quite precisely that it was first an option i was considering without really being aware that i was considering it and then it started to become something i thought about cerebrally intentionally now as soon as i was really thinking about it intentionally i rejected the option it became observed um [Music] the difference i could make being involved in the politics of the muslim world again whether you think of that as the middle east or indonesia i mean the muslim world is this huge strangely shaped part of the world includes the philippines it includes north africa you know um but to get involved in politics of that kind rather than the politics of canada's own indigenous people for example there's no comparison i would have preferred to devote my life and my time my energy and even my my linguistic study my study of languages to the cree the ojibwe the inuit you name it any any of the indigenous groups you have in canada and in that theater every intellectual really mattered everyone made a big difference just one more you know brilliant mind devotes their life to learning the inuit language and being involved in inuit politics it's one of our native peoples that really matters to them it really really matters to you as the person doing the work and it's really going to matter to the future of politics in canada if you think about your future as uh as politics in canada now hashtag spoilers the ultimate conclusion i came to with a great deal of agony and agonizing was that i had to get the hell out of canada that i had to leave canada behind forever and in many ways i did but at that stage of my life when september 11 2001 came around the main thing i have to emphasize to you is i was in this tiny minority of people after about two years of study with professor rameen jahan beglu who was basically the only guy at the university of toronto at that time who really cared about the politics of the muslim world and he was really kind of rebelling against the other professors in the department political science and that he was really seriously trying to engage students in the study of and discussion of the politics of the muslim world and um you know sorry it'd be so easy for me to tell this story while you know deleting my own subjective misery from it it was a tremendously bleak tremendously sorrowful uh time in my life and for that professor it was a tremendously bleak and sorrowful time in his life also why did he latch on to me why did he spend so much time with me one-on-one like i said we became friends to some extent there were no other intellectuals in the university i was you know i was this teenage kid i was a normal aged undergraduate student but he said to me openly he said look you know the other professors here they don't care about politics they don't care about history he would always say they don't care about the history of ideas that was his way of talking that was his idea you know i don't i don't use that term you know but he he clung to me as a fellow intellectual and um i was emotionally very broken up very broken down at that time um it was it was a tremendously dark uh period of my life and by the way sorry i mean my engagement with the politics and history and philosophy of the muslim world um you know that was a kind of uplifting diversion and i could see right away how many white men if they had a weaker ego than i did could get dragged into it uh as soon as i started showing up at these are kind of academic conferences on muslim politics and muslim philosophy what was going on and this is before september 11th but not long before like a couple months before september 11 2001. there were there were almost no white people there like i i you know almost everyone would be an immigrant from somewhere in the muslim world you know and boy a lot of good-looking women were were interested in me at those guys oh yeah i mean in case you think it's only guys who study uh cambodia or vietnam or japan who get laid right away there are a lot of women and what they're looking for is a guy who's just nominally muslim someone who is just muslim enough to satisfy their parents but it was a completely liberated modern intellectual in every other way now obviously i'm not saying this is the majority of muslim women on planet earth i'm saying if you are on a university campus if you are in this kind of intellectual setting there are a lot of gorgeous women from the muslim world including iran and you name it i mean what's all shapes and sizes and they are really looking for a guy who fits my approximate description and they are assuming partly just based on the physionomy of my face they are assuming that i am someone who will satisfy that requirement of being just muslim enough to shut up their parents and grandparents if they if they get married to me so yeah and also um i could see a lot of people would get hooked into it and dragged into it because of the sense of danger because of the stakes so there was one of these events i went to i'm certain i went because this one professor invited me he wanted me to be there and i i could see again how emotionally difficult this event was for him i won't kind of tell his story uh what went on but it was pretty typical formatting that there was this lecture in a in a theater and then we we broke off into a room for discussion and i was among the elite people who got to just hobbed on with people first this and there were people there again i don't i don't know if there was one white person there um but there were people there from across the muslim world one of the guys i talked to was from north africa so you're talking to african muslims as well as muslims from iran or or what have you you know and you know if you've been trapped in the intellectual sub-basement of canadian politics where nobody is a real intellectual and nobody is committed to any kind of outcomes and nobody has any sense of self-sacrifice nobody has any revolutionary order about anything you're you're you're used to the sub-basement of you know canadian political mediocrity you know and then you step into this political theater where all of a sudden there are really high stakes it's really life and death people are really killing one another and people are really raising money for all kinds of different causes and there were people attached to the cia and there were people attached to things scarier than the cia all over the world and they're right there my dude i've done this before september 2001. after september 11th i don't know if some of this stuff became more covert or less but like there are people whether or not they can really make a difference they are debating the future of syria and the future of iran and the future of any number of places in africa and they are debating what they personally are going to do about it and how they're going to raise money from donors there are real stakes and even just the fact that you could publish a book stating your opinion and people would try to kill you if you're used to the dead-end doldrums of canadian politics let me tell you let me tell you that's like washing your mouth out with listerine oh now i'm enough now i'm in a theater people are getting killed for what they believe in people are people are making decisions that have consequences politics has stakes again and this was before september 11 2001. so i felt that and i understood that and you know i i was ignorant i was very young man of course i was ignorant but i was brilliant and everyone picked up on the fact that i was a brilliant woman even the questions i asked from the audience at these events you know what i mean people were like oh who's this guy this guy knows what's up you know what i mean and again i've done the reading man you know i read some history of the muslim world and i read the quran and hadith and i had some say you know not remotely an expert but compared to any white person born and raised in canada was this tiny minority people who knew what was going on you know what i mean but i had the self-discipline and i was self-critical enough you know to to look down that hallway and see where that leads and i understood the ego trip i understood the appeal of it and to close the book cover to close that door and be like no [Laughter] and so the day september 11 2001 came around um you know when you're young one year feels like a long time six months feels good you know all that stuff felt old to me that was old news i already knew about politics in the muslim world i already knew about the history of terrorism and you know just to give an example i knew all about the difference between sunni islam and shia islam and the wars between them and how u.s foreign policy had been involved and how british foreign policy and french foreign policy had been involved with the sykes pico line and uh issues concerning syria and iran that's still going on this day like in this big picture way you know i i knew what was up but it felt old to me none of that was new and it was something i had already decided against for my own future i was not going to learn arabic i was not going to go into politics of that of that kind that was a decision i had i had already made but i knew the madness and the danger and the that that indescribably appealing sense that the decisions you make will have consequences for generations to come if i knew i knew that that world the politics of the islamic world that that was that high-stakes game that every other avenue within the halls of the university sorry to mix metaphors but every other avenue that the university presented me they la it lacked that high stakes quality you know at that time then as now i loved the the philosophy of uh of ancient rome of ancient greece uh really athens more than rome to be honest but you know sure aristotle fascinating thucydides fascinating you know herodotus whatever all kinds of stuff for you know but i mean if you choose to devote your life to the study of ancient grace and ancient rome where are the stakes where is the danger where is the consequence where is the risk and and how can you change the world through that kind of to that kind of study you know now of course you know if i were talking to a younger person they were asking i do have answers like you can you can change the world uh by learning ancient greek or latin and where you can't you can but wow when you stepped into that that world of of politics of politics of the muslim world and right up to september 11 2001 everyone was ignoring it like everyone was ignoring except me and my one professor ramin shan i don't think he had a single other student okay i don't think it is single other student who wasn't born muslim who was interested and of course most of the students who were born muslim they also weren't terrorists but there were a few muslim students a born and raised muslim who had some some level of uh of interest so i had just flown to washington dc and back alone so as mentioned i'm a very young man in uh september 11 2001. i had just been in washington dc i wish i could say i flew back on september 10th but from memory i think it was actually september 9th i flew back it's possible it was september 10th but it was it was just before so i believe the flight was on the ninth but then you know i don't know i think i was just kind of really tired for a day because of when the flight you know that is kind of lose a day in and out of airports so it felt like it was the very next day that's but i believe i flew on the ninth and then and then the eleventh happened and um you know i was shaving and my father was so it's also very unusual that i traveled alone it's not worth getting into what but you know i had just been in washington dc and i had visited the pentagon i went and visited the pentagon oh yeah i had been standing right there looking at the pentagon and when i when i first got back you know my parents said oh what did you think of dc and i said the only building in that entire city that has architecture with any sense of good taste to distinguish it is the pentagon i said that is a town full of unspeakably awful tasteless architecture and the only exception the only building i can praise is the pentagon that's a that's a world that's a good-looking building you know so yeah yeah yeah if you know sorry if you know something about architecture and if you've traveled in europe or asia i'm sorry but you know i'm sorry but the the congress building is unspeakably ugly poorly made building but the pentagon that that really held up you know i mean just so i just been there i just seen washington dc in person i just seen the pentagon in person it felt to me like i just woken up from the airplane but actually i don't know if 12 hours or 14 hours or 24 some some number of hours had passed um since i'd gotten off the airplane and uh i was shaving there in front of the shaving mirror and my father came in and he said to me a plane crashed into you know the world trade center building in uh in new york city and i laughed and my first reaction was to say i told them i told them not to put a tower there you remember we were talking about this 20 years i just started doing this bit with him i just started like acting out this comedy scene as if i were this old man who at the time that the tower was being constructed i had said it's only a matter of time if you put a tower there before a flight you know an airplane goes into it at that moment i had no idea it was a terrorist act like that the first plane hit you know the assumption was this was just an error that this was an accident that this was you know a flight path there or a technical error or computer or that something had had caused this as an accident and i stood there you know laughing at the absurdity of you know an aircraft collision right in the middle of of new york city i mean it is absurd but if in that moment you think it is human incompetence or an urban planning error or something of the kind you know that that might be how you react to it anyway so again my father is now deceased this is a relatively happy memory and uh i did it's a long time ago now i did have a formal education in comedy doing comedy and i may now get back to it my old age i may now return to doing stand-up comedy or something but i'd done sketch comedy instead of comedy a little bit and stuff i had written comedy so i really responded at that moment as an opportunity to to to have a laugh at the absurdity of it all um now within 20 or 30 minutes of that i think the theory was starting to become prevalent on the tv news that this was not an accident that this was not uh you know this was not merely due to a computer error or you know some kind of navigation error or planning error this wasn't due to incompetence of air traffic control or something but that they said this had been done intentionally and then um so again anyone can look up now how many minutes passed between one airplane striking one building and another striking another straight striking the second building but um i walked from my home to the university campus i kind of had a series of of errands to do and my parents had asked me to buy them something as i recall uh something very particular you had to get from a health food store like it might have been psyllium husk some one of these funny funny food additives or or what have you and i remember as i was walking down the street you could tell who had heard the news and who had not no matter which age group the people were of the people you saw on the street so again i'm going through normal streets in toronto and then into the university university of toronto is very much integrated into the city so there are normal pedestrians there too not everyone's university but whether you're talking about someone 60 years old 50 years old or like teenagers attached to university the people who knew the way they were looking down at the ground the way they were talking to one another they were so down cast and you know this sense of this sense of suddenly being made small by the enormity of political events in the world was it was evident even in the hunching of their shoulders right but then as you went you know i remember there were two people i passed and two people there's more than two but there's two in particular i remember and they were talking in this upbeat way about their love lives about who was dating who or you know how how kevin and stacey were doing together or something like this and you could just tell your past and like they don't know yet i mean they they left the house and had to walk in the park or something they before this happened because it had just happened this was during the time when the first planet hit and the second plane hadn't hit yet i finished shaving and went out the door um so it was during these moments probably that the that the second plane went into the second tower um [Music] and at that time so i really dislike this element of canadian culture flat screen tvs were still very expensive and there was this horrible building in the middle of uh of university toronto campus and they tried to make it less horrible by adding huge tv screens playing the news at all times just as i recall just a few days before maybe it was a few months before but not very long before it's number 11 they'd added these horrible uh giant screens and i remember thinking talk about bad architecture you know you've taken this awful interior space and you've made it worse by adding noise pollution and you know air pollution and i think there has been never there's never been another day in the history of the university where people were sitting on the floor watching the tv you know in the middle of that there were no benches there was a sterile concrete windowless hall people were so blown over and you saw i mean again i was just walking past this there were people who were kind of happy and walking you know enjoying their day and they came in the doors and they'd oh what why are people sitting on the floor what what's in the oh oh and then you know they also might sit on the floor they might lean against what you saw people at each stage of recognition and uh i hope i hope none of these people now get on and make a youtube video about me but you know i so i had to do a number of things on the campus and then i went up to this health food store and i was smiling i'll tell you just the moment while i was as as i was observing all this i was really smiling and when i got to the health food store i said to them they were they were really schlumpy hippies there were stereotypical hippies two white people who looked and dressed like a stereotypical happy working in this healthy store and i forget i was buying psyllium husk or whatever i was buying i had to get some get some things and uh you know i said tell me you know have you have you heard the news and they were sitting there slumped over and their situation was they had actually been listening to the radio continuously and when i came in they turned it down like i guess they're you know when customers come in they turn the down radio down you know and uh i see you know you hear that an airplane went down and they said yeah we've been sitting listening to the radio continuously you know uh a second plane just went into the the second tower so i heard about that what was what was out of the oh that was this way you know so why was i smiling i was smiling the whole way the whole walk um you know it was not certain at that moment that it was terrorism once the second plane hit then obviously people started really committing to the assumption that this was a terrorist attack you know um you know it wasn't it wasn't clear yet that it was terrorism and then it wasn't clear that it was muslim terrorism it could have been some other kind of terrorist some other kind of attack but i i felt and i knew that now the whole world was going to be dragged out of the doldrums of this self-centered self-indulgent myopic world of politics that we had been in since the end of the soviet union you know that this this period of uh period of fundamental intellectual laziness was coming to an end that we were going to be returned whether we liked it or not to a world where you know political decisions really mattered uh i was like oh that's it we've been you know we've been dreaming ever since the fall of the berlin wall or ever since the end of the hostility and threat of nuclear war from the soviet union you know we've been floating on this cloud above the world um and now now someone has reached up to grab that cloud and pull it back down to earth and say no you know the wicked ways of the world are not done with you yet and all of the things that were being discussed on the news at that time so i i still feel this way when i listen to the radio or television talking about chinese politics all the time it's like nobody can pronounce the name of xi jinping you know like the leader of china they can't pronounce the name of the cities in china they obviously know nothing about but at that time all of the things they were struggling to pronounce and struggling to explain from the muslim world from muslim i knew those words i didn't speak arabic but you know what it is when you do university level study you learn key terms you learn the names of places and historically significant figures political leaders and again i understood already the distinction between sunni and shiite and all this stuff you know um so i was in this position where i was hearing the radio announcers struggling to articulate unfamiliar words and concepts and i already had a real depth of knowledge and familiarity with them and again i felt that you know i remember talking to that same professor about it talking to professor john beglew about it and i was like oh well you used to be the representative of the most unpopular and most marginal area of study here at the university and all of a sudden you're on center stage all of a sudden everyone admits this is the most most important most consequential most high risk area of study in politics um but i'd already made my decision and the biggest difference between the man i am today and the man i was back then is of course if if i had had the attitudes and knowledge that i have today back in 201 i would have joined the army period no hesitation none the only question would have been which army did i want to join would i join the american army would it join the french army like the french foreign legion i would have just sat down like well you know what what am i signing up 100 uh today you know the man i am today and maybe even the man i was 10 years ago you know uh would have been 100 down for that for that action and who i was in september 11th uh 2001 who i was at that time it did not occur to me to join the army it's not that i was tempted and decided against it absolutely did not enter my mind that this was a war i could fight it didn't occur to me i could join the american army i didn't even know that was possible for a canadian citizen i didn't know it was possible for me to join the franchise nobody had ever talked about that and you know the canadian army it is what it is if you want action you got to join one of the armies that's really going to go into uh hard fighting whether that's in uh you know afghanistan or or otherwise and at that moment that day we didn't know where the war was going to be you know what was it you know some people were already saying it's going to be afghanistan because that was one of the places associated with osama bin laden but you know it's not as if the hijackers were actually from afghanistan it wasn't it wasn't as if america had been invaded by afghanistan like you know who exactly america would go to war against and who would be their allies it was on that day um that was all a matter of of sheer you know sheer speculation but you know uh it was it was a very very dark time in my life i mean the whole year 2001 2002 thereabouts you know i felt that my place in the world was to be an intellectual um you know i felt that you know my place in the world was to offer a certain kind of commentary uh was to be a certain kind of creative artist um maybe to some extent to be a kind of historian a kind of uh you know political and economic analyst it absolutely did not occur to me that being an intellectual was compatible with uh going through the training to enter the us marine corps absolutely did not it did not occur to me that being an intellectual was compatible with joining the french foreign legion or what have you i figured that out too late um i figured out that the type of compromise you have to make right here at the university of victoria the kind of toadying you have to engage in the kind of self-abnegation you have to engage in just to be in a normal master's degree program phd program just to get along even at the undergraduate level in a third-rate canadian university that is what's incompatible with being an intellectual that actually it's the traditional academic path that i would never be able to compromise with that i would have been much better off uh joining the army so for me september 11 2001 mark this this very interesting uh turning point in my life because i was i was coming to the point of deciding um you know not in terms of earning money but in terms of what was really going to be the meaning of my life what was i going to do um as an intellectual and what what kind of politics was it going to trade in there seemed to me at that time to only be two paths open in front of me uh and by the way so i've got to say this is related to veganism and vegetarianism the other path i had been on was ecology and that included directly lobbying city hall on ecology real ecology not complaining to people about recycling plastic containers you know what i mean so i'd also really looked at thought about ecological politics as my my path forward and you know having concluded that no in canada there was that was a path to nowhere you know the two paths that remained open to me were either i was going to commit to buddhist politics and specifically the buddhist politics of disaster areas like cambodia cambodia was not the only option but cambodia is the easy one for me to say cambodia was obviously a post-war barely even post-war but a war-torn poverty-stricken bomb crater-filled disaster area so when i say buddhist politics again you can see there's the same sense of the high stakes of politics in the muslim world politics the developing world politics of poverty war consequences you know okay either it's going to be that path or it's going to be first nations politics politics of the creed the ojibwe the mohawk the den inuit you know you name it those were really the only two paths i felt uh were open to me and were worth pursuing that were that were fit for uh you know that were fit for a human being uh given my given my services at that time it absolutely did not occur to me to become a lawyer for example i i rejected that i did consider and i did go to the training sessions i did consider becoming a police officer i've mentioned that before that actually went to some of the training days and talked to the police about what it would take to be a police officer but i only thought of that as a temporary expedient that it might be a cop for for one or two years uh you know and then move on to cambodia or what have you i did consider you guys probably know about this i tried to go into becoming a pharmacist and a few other jobs like that but you see i could imagine i could imagine being a pharmacist and being an intellectual trying to make the world a better place this this path of having a meaningful life that those seemed compatible to me and it absolutely did not occur to me that i could join the army and i could be a part of this history directly and that i could still be an intellectual i'd never met anyone who thought that way or who had that that kind of experience um you know i was smiling and laughing all day and everyone else around me was terrified my own mother was terrified my own father was terrified like not the tv broadcasters they were more professional the voices on the radio you could hear they were terrified and there were there were the most pitiful call-in shows i'll never forget the voice of some redneck some guy who called in and saying uh i don't understand why these people want to kill us wasn't it just a short time ago i saw on the news we were we were giving them blankets and things when they had an earthquake like people were calling in in this bereaved stunned state everyone around me was terrified because they were suddenly dealing with a political landscape that was totally unfamiliar to them and for me even though i just had about two years of education two years a long time when you're young when you're young it's a big percentage of your whole life i had about two years of experience with politics of the the muslim world to me it was a landscape i was totally familiar with i was totally comfortable with what i had been uncomfortable with was the extent to which the american empire was sleepwalking through these issues the extent to which people had remained totally ignorant of the real consequences of and the real stakes of what what america had been doing in iraq in iran um in the greater israel the region what israel and its neighbors however you want to put that area you know that actually america had been making tremendously high-stakes decisions in a way that had absolutely no democratic transparency and accountability and where the the journalists were not anyway interested so on and so forth i already knew who osama bin laden was for most people i mean j.j mccullough just said j.j mccullough in his video he refers to some of the latin as a shadowy and unknown figure at that not to me right i knew who that was i already knew the history of that dude and his terrorist movement and how it connects to saudi arabia and how it connects to yemen and you know i already i was already familiar with that so uh you know i mean that's such a strange moment in life there will never be a moment in my life where what i know about myanmar suddenly matters to my mother and my father and all the kind of mediocre minds around me who are otherwise indifferent to politics you know like oh well i've put in this time and effort studying the politics of myanmar and it's never going to matter to you it's never going to be real to you in the way it's real to me you know you're never gonna weep over the politics of myanmar in the way that i do and that's awful that's what i said in the video recently you know i see my role as a as an intellectual as being like an elvis impersonator living in a country where nobody else knows who elvis is well this this gives you a bit of a deeper sense of it you know what what cambodia means to me and what i know about the history and including the current politics company it's never going to matter to anyone else they're never going to care about it the way i do what i know about a place like laos you know there are all these things well i had been studying what seemed like you know the most remote and obscure thing in politics at that time people had not heard of yemen people really at that time most people did not know afghanistan they did not they couldn't find it on a map or they really had never heard of it if you know obviously economically it was a place of no significance you know i i know some of you watching this may say oh come on that's that's nonsense because there had been this war in afghanistan the 1970s and like you can we you know that now but i'm just saying you know back in back in 2001 most people that they regarded this as the most trivial the most obscure nobody knew nobody cared and there and there was no internet i mean between 1997 and 2001 you had the first blossoming of the internet but most most people if if they wanted to know about afghanistan they would have to walk to their library and take an encyclopedia off the bookshelf and leave through and look it up and what they would find in that encyclopedia wouldn't be worth knowing it wouldn't tell you any of these you know shocking disturbing political religious and cultural facts that are that are what really mattered what people really needed to learn you know in uh in in 2001. so you know myanmar is never going to matter to you and you and you and the people around me in the way it matters to me the politics of thailand you guys if you've been with my channel for a long time you've seen me really getting very emotionally moved about that where i say look to all you people this is just a place where you go on vacation you talk about thailand and you talk about swimming and weight loss but i'm talking about a military dictatorship that destroyed democracy like i'm talking about the politics that have unfolded over the last several years and i really care i really care about the body count i really care about the people who got shot dead in the street and the cops showed up with a [ __ ] hose and hosed it down and got rid of the blood you know the extent to which you know the state itself is implicated and involved in uh murder you know within town that this to me this is real politics this really matters and it's never going to matter to you not even if you've been on vacation in thailand five times and you're making a youtube video talking about you're going back to thailand for the sixth time and you're looking forward to swimming and riding your bicycle and losing weight like there's nothing i can do to make the politics of myanmar the politics of thailand the politics of cambodia matter to you uh the way they matter to me and september 11 2001 i was grinning ear to ear i was smiling and laughing the whole day because it seemed like suddenly for just one day all the people who live these lives uh sleepwalking you know who really live a life that has more in common with a dream than it was with reality for just one day they woke up and they lived in the same world that i do a world of massacres a world of unspeakable political violence that is going on at all times whether we call it peace or war a world in which each of us makes moral decisions that have real consequences even if the decision you're making is just to sit on your ass and play video games instead of getting up and trying to change something on planet earth all right all the evils that unfold in this planet whether we call them religious whether we call them cultural or whether we call them political all those evils are made possible not just by the actions not just by the decisions of a small number of evil men but the decisions made by millions of us to indulge our own selfish term fatuous indifference it's our decision to sit by and do nothing and in the last 20 years i've gotten to see how september 11 2001 briefly sounded an alarm rang a bell that roused the whole world that woke everybody up and then slowly gradually everyone got in their pajamas and went back to sleep