I created a 9/11 poll here because I want to get a better idea as to where my readers are coming from. You can check off as many answers you want; please let me know how I can improve my approach if I ever make another poll. First, however, I need to clarify a few things.
We bloggers are an eclectically politicized community. Although we share many common values, we often differ in our philosophies. Perhaps the most potentially divisive point of contention is 9/11. By now almost everyone has heard some of the objecting viewpoints about what happened on 9/11. (If you haven't, just do what everybody else has done: watch Loose Change 2nd Edition. After that, you're on your own.) It looks like most people have "drawn their line in the sand," as In Plane Site director Dave VonKleist likes to say. Many humans have chosen to believe "the official story", while the rest have chosen to believe what I like to call "other-than". Within the "other-than" camp there are an infinite number of sub-camps, many of which have chosen to wage polemical war on the other sub-camps. Nico Haupt, for example, has even created a glossary of archetypes in an attempt to label every type of other-than believer in existence. Haupt is himself a leading member of the "911 TV fakery" sub-camp, which endeavors to document evidence of doctored 9/11 footage.
As soon as one begins spelunking into the nightmarish catacombes of TV fakery, the phenomenon of false recall, and certain existential concepts like the Jungian collective unconscious, the sheer enormity of The 9/11 Question becomes absolutely terrifying. The earnest seeker wonders whether anything can ever be known. The insurmountable complexity of 9/11 research disabuses this seeker of some very basic assumptions. Mugged for his compass, he is faced with a choice between petrifaction and wandering. Somnambulance is not an option; that would be tantamount to returning to square one. And he is too proud to freeze in place, so he wanders.
Inevitably he finds himself drawn to the sub-camps whose campfires burn brightest. Their ad campaigns are sharp, their numbers are great. They demand a reverence for World Trade Center Building 7, citing it as the bloodiest morsel of evidence against the perpetrators. Or they carry the Pentagon on their shoulders, measuring the 20-foot hole in the wall. Still others study the squibs and explosions emanating from the Twin Towers, with the patience of botanists identifying a new flower.
All of these divisions have been seen as either a bad thing or a good thing for the "other-than" movement. Those who see it as a bad thing hold that a Unified Theory would be more effective for getting the message out to the mainstream. Others, like Haupt, maintain that individualized research actually clarifies issues.
They're both right. We do need unity, but not based on a theory. We must base our unity on one thing and one thing only: love. Whoa! Love? Yeah, love. Remember that? That's a thing where you accept someone, or a number of people, or every human being on Earth, unconditionally. "Oh, come on, you're talking about a mother's love for her child." No I'm not. Who ever said unconditional love was exclusive to the realm of parenthood? I sure didn't. Or if I did, I was wrong. We have to begin to remember that love is our saving grace. It is the only thing that will ever solve the problems our sick and dying planet is facing right now. After all the tacticians have spoken, after all the activists have rallied, after all the diplomats have done their work and retired, the violence has remained. But so has love, quietly, in the background. We must cast from our minds all pretentions that love is an outdated cliche of the 60's, and start believing in the awesome transcendence of love. You can't knock that, no matter what cynical TV sitcom says otherwise.
So whether you think that 9/11 was an outside job or an inside job, I still love ya. Everyone I have spoken with here in the blogosphere has been a gift to my heart and mind. I have learned some very valuable things from people with whom I disagree on the 9/11 question. Long live unity.
