Monday, 24 September 2001

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my comments on Saturday touched off a spirited debate within my own household.  Kat wants to make it clear that she can’t understand how anyone, anywhere, could celebrate the death of several thousand people under any circumstance.  I actually agree with her, and didn’t mean to imply that I supported the celebration (much less the practice) of mass murder.  I don’t.  I’d like to think that nobody does, but a few lines from a song keep coming to mind: “Folks are basically decent / Conventional wisdom would say / Well, we read about the exceptions / In the paper every day.”

A thought experiment: consider the massive outpouring of charitable giving for the victims of 9/11, and then suppose that there had been a similarly massive outpouring of charitable aid ten years earlier for the people of Afghanistan, whose country was shattered by Soviet occupation.

• Monday, 24 September 2001 was published on Monday, September 24th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.