9/11 Coverage Ducks Biggest Question: Why?

Pick a network – any network – on Wednesday and you got no less than 16 hours of programming about "The Day Evil Struck America." As I sat on the couch, counting the network promos (which unlike other ads apparently weren't in poor taste), I couldn't shake the feeling that the copious coverage was somehow lacking some essential element. Hmm. Truly heart-wrenching profiles of victims and the families who lost them? Check. Gut-wrenching images of the destruction looped ad nauseum? Check. Two-minute packages by on-air reporters with titles like "America: Changed Forever" that basically started and ended at airport security. Check. Endless parade of Joe Sixpacks telling the camera that "it really put things in perspective." Check.

Then it hit me: the only thing missing from all of the reflections, re-creations and rhetoric was an examination of perhaps the single most important question raised by the attacks: why? Why did 19 men hijack four commercial airliners for the purpose of crashing them into America's foremost symbols of power and wealth? And why did so many people in Third World countries rush out of their hovels and into the dirt streets and rejoice? (Remember those images?) Why do all of these people hate America so much? Nobody seemed up to answering.

Sadly, I don't think the average American wants to know. As Wednesday's coverage clearly demonstrated, we'd rather focus on the who, what, where and when, extract something personal from it all, and then hopefully come out at the end with Osama bin Laden's head on a stick. But how many people have examined these questions, either personally or politically, in any depth? Sure, the savagery and the scale of the attacks is hard to comprehend, let alone analyze and pore over. And let's face it: nobody likes to be hated. But it is precisely this reluctance to confront the implications and the issues raised by these attacks that will stunt true healing and growth in this county, as well as ensure that more attacks will come.

A year ago, when these questions were impossible to ignore, the answers offered by everyone from President Bush to the media followed largely the same tack: Evil. The hijackers were crazy men compelled by hate and evil to perform a senseless act of violence on America. We are Good. The terrorists were Evil. Evil Struck America. Evil people want to destroy our way of life. Well, is every person who cheered the attacks also an evil crazy person? Do they want to destroy the American way of life? Or are they responding to the infinitesimally small chance that they will ever have an opportunity to pursue it – mostly due to some of our country's international and economic and political policies?

Let's take a hypothetical example from Saudi Arabia, former home to most of the 19 hijackers. In one of the wealthiest kingdoms in the world, a boy grows up in abject poverty. Government and religion are one in the same, so he attends Islamic schools (if he is lucky) that teach him to read the Koran, but little in the way of practical skills. Perhaps he can get a demeaning job somewhere that pays him a dollar a day. Perhaps not. His family is frozen in a de facto caste system. If he speaks out, he will be jailed and tortured. If he doesn't, he may get the same. Meanwhile, a decadent and corrupt royal family controls virtually all the country's wealth and opportunity, and spreads it thinly through the countless layers of princes, privilege and patronage.

But wait. There is hope. Hope in the form of a wonderful country built on freedom, equality and justice. Where one can speak freely, pursue his interests, and through hard work, provide a family with a comfortable life. This country, the most powerful on earth, calls itself the Defender of Freedom. The Arsenal of Democracy. This country is the United States of America. USA! Maybe America can wield its influence and bring increased freedom to the people of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps instill some of the principles it fought both a revolutionary and a civil war to uphold.

But instead he learns that the USA is one of the royal family's staunchest allies. Nothing will change in Saudi Arabia unless the US exerts tremendous pressure. And it won't. But why? Why does this self-proclaimed land of the free and home of the brave – this country that wrote into its constitution that all men are born with equal rights – contradict the very principles on which it was founded to support a tyrannical and corrupt regime? Or stand by and do nothing?

In a word: money.

Or oil, in this particular case. The United States supports the Saudi government because it is in our country's best economic interests to do so. Let me be more precise: It is in YOUR economic best economic interest that America does so. In fact, everyday life for you and me would be different without our Saudi sweetheart oil connection – much more different than it is in the wake of 9/11. For one thing, you probably couldn't pay someone to take that SUV off your hands. So America conveniently sweeps our founding principles under the rug.

But where does this leave our idealistic young man? Probably right back where he started – except with a lot more anger and a lot less enthusiasm for living. You could paint the same picture in at least 100 other countries and not be too far off. My point is not that you should care – but rather that you should at least be aware. Before he shows up at your office building in a hijacked 747 or a Ryder truck packed with fertilizer. Because as we now know, he just might.

More than anything, 9/11 was a brutal reminder of an equally brutal reality: This world is composed of haves and have-nots. This dichotomy is the absolute reality of capitalism, the game we are trying to export to the entire globe. It is a zero sum game. We live the way we do because they are living the way they do. It is at their expense; otherwise, it would be at ours. And as long as there are haves and have-nots, the world will continue to be a nasty place – just as it has always been. Just ask yourself: How long would I work alongside my eight year-old daughter in some Indonesian sweatshop? In the meantime, these have-nots will continue to step forward under the guise of religion, idealism, madness or a mix of the three (which are not always dissimilar) to either "get theirs" or strike a blow against the system that they have rejected – it having rejected them first (and you don't have to look too far to see who's in charge of that system today). To us they are villains. To their own, they are heroes. We make them so. Because we give them no apparent choice.

Now this is the part where most conservatives drape themselves in the flag and accuse me of hating America. Or of blaming the USA for September 11, instead of the hijackers, or Islam. Well, I believe the United States has earned every advantage and every penny it owns. It has abused the rules of economic engagement no more or less than any hegemon in history. And it should protect all of those advantages and all of those pennies. Because your life and my life are a lot better for each and every one of them. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for anybody or to feel guilty about what you have. Just don't pretend that you don't know why the have-nots keep showing up at our door. Or that periodic acts of kindness on the anniversaries of tragedies will change one god damned thing about it. And don't call it Evil – as if it were some mystical, unexplainable force. Instead, be aware of what we are doing in the world. Understand why we are doing it. Comprehend the consequences. Make an informed decision about whether you believe in it or not. And act accordingly. In the Information Age, how can ignorance be anything but a sin?

Yet the exonerating haze of ignorance is what most of us seem to crave. Many foreign observers have said that they believe the terrorist attacks were designed by Al Qaeda as a wake up call to the American public – an enormous catastrophic blow to the wall of arrogant, self-absorbed ignorance we've built so meticulously with Happy Meals and football games and MTV. Judging by Wednesday's programming, I can say with certainty that we haven't let the terrorists win.