Sunday was a miserable and rainy day, and sick with a cold I decided to just lie about the apartment and watch a 9/11 conspiracy video.Typically, I’m not a fan of the genre. Most conspiracy theories strike me as being too intricate, all involving too many perfectly synchronized and working parts, to live in the same world that I do. I simply cannot fathom how silence and discipline could be maintained throughout all the conspirators and witnesses, when there were are so many compelling reasons in our publicity hungry world for each link in this chain to break?
No matter, friends whose opinions I very much respected had suggested I watch one, and so on Sunday I did.
Watching the video—Hidden Secrets About 911 World Trade Center Attack 2001—was a concussive and depressing experience. Unbalanced and without any sort of clear, guiding narrative, the movie hammers away at you in a slightly superior, almost sneering tone. It’s a death by a thousand cuts method of persuasion. The video presents a relentless onslaught of irregularities and suspicions that eventually form a great, hazy cloud of doubt. It’s hard to see your way out of this cloud, and the style of the movie, which is chaotic and smothering, never allows you the space to back up and consider or refute each claim, but leaves you breathless and woozy, choked by the all the dust it’s unsettled.
At any rate, the experience of watching the movie left me tired, depressed and uncertain, and full of the sense of dread that images from 9/11 always instill in me I looked out the window at the rain, a foreshadowing of Hurricane Sandy that’s predicted to hit NYC tonight.
Climate change and the extreme and often unpredictable weather it brings with it, is upon us. Over the course of my lifetime, I can say that the weather has definitely changed and increasingly I think that we’re entering into an age where the new normal is completely unknowable.
As a culture, we seem remarkably removed from this reality. For instance, this year was the first since 1988 that climate change wasn’t even mentioned in the Presidential Debates. Further, back in August, the Republican Party delayed their convention in Tampa by a day because of the anticipated severity of Hurricane Isaac– which also happened to be the same day that a record ice melt in the arctic had just been announced. There are those in the Republican Party who deny climate change, and in spite of actually delaying their convention because of it, still will not accept that it’s upon us.
To me, that’s a bit of a head-scratcher.
For whatever series of complicated reasons, our politics and culture refuses to dig in and acknowledge what a desperate, catastrophic problem this poses. Climate change could annihilate us, but sincerely altering the way we live in the world would be immense, long-term and expensive, and so we simply deny its reality and whistle past the graveyard.
(Flooding in Brooklyn on Monday morning)
When 9/11 took place, America went to war. They dedicated their arsenal of brilliance, money, will and life toward a cause, and I just wish that we would see the potential of Hurricane Sandy in the same way. We need to redirect our efforts– as if in a holy war against terror– to combat and defend ourselves from the climate change in which we’re all so complicit.
Good luck to everybody over the next few days, and in the years following, too.
Comments
8 responses to “9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Hurricane Sandy”
Well, well, the heathen unbeliever is scared.
Let the hurricanes come Lord, and have them carry me to your bosom.
Mehrdad:
I’m not sure toward what cause or entity I’m an unbeliever, I just think that it’s a cruel irony that so much of the west’s considerable resources have been utilized for a specious war on terror, when climate change is such a clear and evident problem. It’s like the west, born into good fortune and privilege, simply believe that bad weather, bad anything, in fact, is just something that happens in other countries. Sandy looks very serious to me and I worry about it, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Global warming is a real and undeniable fact of life on Earth. Most are content to ignore the signs and allow it to occur. No one wants to give up a single thing. We want our cars and big oil wants their profits. The fact that our grandchildren might be the last generation of humans to live on this planet has no effect on their reasoning. I have shouted myself hoarse and not a soul has listened.
May God help us all.
Michael:
I’m 100% in agreement. Just look at where Canada has been heading, and accelerating towards in the hands of the conservatives. They are about to sign a 31 year investment deal with China, a deal that means more disaster to come as it will be completely based on energy exploitation. And there’s no debate, no talk, nothing.
it’s a mess…
Oh, yeah. My silly first post was an attempt to point to the billions of people on this planet who actually believe it’s just a short stop before eternal life in the “next world.” People who really believe that their real existence will begin after the “end of the world” are a massive obstacle to dealing with environmental problems.
[…] media has been terrible at is keeping the public’s focus on a threat to Canadian civilization greater than terrorism or even drunk drivers (drunks kill more Canadians each year than Jihadists or the fabled […]
Michael, what a curious post. You started with 9/11 truth, then went into climate change. Why? Because you prefer climate change as your personal “conspiracy theory?”
Let’s go back to 9/11. Do you, or do you not, believe it is possible that 9/11 is an inside job? Is there anything within you that says you are willing to suspend your disbelief momentarily and open your mind to the possibility that certain elements within the American government could have made 9/11 happen, rather than 19 guys from caves armed only with box cutters?
Maybe you can’t possibly come outside your bubble. It’s understandable, many people can’t. But if you are willing to open your mind, check out Webster Tarpley’s book “9/11: Synthetic Terror, Made in the USA.”. It will put the false flag of 9/11 in a historical context.
Also, go to the web to check out “Loose Change” the documentary and visit rememberbuilding7.com, the great smoking gun of 9/11.
It’s a painful, depressing truth. But it is the truth. Fight the future, Michael. Fight the future.
New Jersey:
Thanks for the suggestion. Many people have directed me to Loose Change, and I’ve seen snippets of it, but have yet to watch it in it’s totality– but I will.
I found the documentaries that I’ve seen very compelling, but I maintain some distance from them because both movies, although persuasive, were not balanced. I’m not sophisticated or educated enough to make informed judgements on many of the matters brought up, and since they ( film makers) didn’t allow scholarly refutation of the points they hammered home, I can’t objectively locate the truth. But I’ll keep trying, I’ll keep trying.