< hmmm... >

   "America has acted in recent years as if to be on the receiving end of evil is, in itself, to be good.  That being opposed to wrong is not the same thing as being right, that being a victim is not the same as being an innocent are ideas not warmly entertained of late in the land of the free."

- Pico Iyer, "Move On"
TIME, 8 September 2003

   Tomorrow, America celebrates the sixth year anniversary of 9/11.  It's been six years since that awful sight of an airplane cutting through the World Trade Center.  And it has been six years of awful sights of car bombs and dead bodies in the Middle East over the War on Terror.

   No, I'm not anti-American, but seeing how Americans deal with tragedy and disaster makes me contemplate on Pico Iyer's essay even more.  Hurricane Katrina made international headlines: two years later, CNN's Anderson Copper is still going at it.  The sight of helpless Americans in New Orleans is one thing, but it seems that an indifference is manifested in people not remembering the tsunami that swept through South Asia two years ago.  The difference is very stark: while the tsunami victims have rebuilt their lives themselves, the Americans didn't.

   Yet it isn't just about America's indifference towards the plight of other nations experiencing disaster while showing us a scar in Katrina.  This is about America, six 9/11s after the first plane crashed through the World Trade Center in an act of terror, going on with its war and showing us a scar that we've been so grown to seeing.  A few years ago, we saw Saddam Hussein's statue toppled in Baghdad.  Years later, we're seeing the desert cities of Iraq still under siege: the arbitrary "enemy" looming, but still not there.

   The war that America fought has gone through so many changes that we who are not in America's shores no longer know what exactly is the reason why an American soldier in Iraq dons his fatigues and fires his bullets.  First it was Osama bin Laden, then it became Saddam Hussein, then we're at that point where the "enemy" becomes a vague idea behind a mask that labels him an "extremist," and even to the halls of the US government itself.  Too many of these American soldiers are fighting a war half a world away to protect their people at the expense of innocent civilians who surely have a right to peace.

   For the past six years, there is no "global news" that doesn't revolve around America's war on terrorism: if anything, we non-Americans are learning more and more about the way America is.  As a non-American, there's a part of me that sympathizes with the loss of life in 9/11, and there's a part of me that blames the loss of even more lives in Iraq and Afghanistan because of how America responded to 9/11.  And then there's a part of me that asks if America is still mortally wounded over 9/11, or if it's showing me and the rest of the world an old scar that has already been healed over after six 9/11s.