I simply cannot express how much I loved the piece below. I loved it so much I read it in its entirety on my Coffee Party Show “Politics Done Right”.
A few months ago I wrote the article Willful Ignorance where I detailed many of the issues that are afflicting us that is very obvious but we choose because of culture and other reasons to ignore or not see. We continue to allow our Mainstream Media, Right Wing Media, and Nonsense Media to keep us either confused or have us keep our eyes off the ball.
Again, we choose to allow others to mislead us; we then sit back and blame the politicians. The reality is we have no one else to blame but ourselves. Our politicians reflect who we are and our own gullibility.
Please read and re-read this article as it has several messages in it that if we all heed it, we will not only learn how to listen better but we will see that which is right in front of us that we simply choose to not see.
Remembering 9-11, And The Blindness Of Disbelief
by Al Cannistraro
Al Cannistraro is a retired Social Security Disability Adjudicator from New York City. He lives in upstate New York near Albany, where he pursues various and sundry interests.
They say that "seeing is believing." I’d like to add my insight that, sometimes, not believing is not seeing. It’s an insight that I came to as a result of the 9-11 tragedy.
I have a great deal of familiarity with and affection for the World Trade Center in New York City. The NY state agency I worked for and eventually retired from, was among the first tenants to take up residence in 2 W.T.C. the south tower. This was before the private sector began to find the location attractive. My agency occupied floors numbered in the twenties even before the building was topped off above the 110th floor. Eventually, as the building’s construction progressed, I worked on the 83rd and 85th floors of 2 W.T.C.. My particular desk locations while on these floors was at the northwest corner of the building, with beautiful views of the Hudson River.
I loved my view. My view of the Hudson, just above the entrance to NY Harbor, included the Statue of Liberty. If I pressed my face against the glass I could see sunsets over New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson, often breathtaking. Some days I could see small planes flying over the Hudson at an altitude of 100 – 200 feet beneath my perches on the 83rd and 85th floors.
During the US Bicentennial in 1976, the building was opened on a Sunday in July to allow employees and their friends and families to watch Operation Sail, a visiting parade of tall sailing ships from around the world, cruising about New York Harbor.
Oftentimes while at work, I’d be above the clouds and would call my wife, to ask her about the weather on the street. The elevators were very fast, and sometimes my ear pressure did not equalize, resulting in severe earaches. Yet still, I loved working at the Trade Center.
Which brings me to my 9-11 story and my insight into the opposite of seeing is believing.
My agency had moved out of the Trade Center years before, but we did maintain an office just a block East of there. I had also moved on to a position in Albany. On the morning of 9-11, my boss and I were on our way from Albany down to the city for a early morning business meeting. We rode the 6:40am Amtrak train. The tracks run along the west bank of the Hudson. Whenever I take this trip I always try to sit on the river side of the train car going down to the city because of the wonderful view. As we approached New York city, I was startled to see a large commercial plane flying low over the Hudson. I knew from experience that only the northbound planes fly over the Hudson and none ever fly that low.
As the train approached the city I began to overhear people, getting on the train, saying something about a plane having hit one of the Trade Center towers. But I "knew" that could not be so. When I heard the claim a second and third time I thought that maybe one of those small planes I had often seen experienced a malfunction and crashed nearby. When someone said they thought they heard it was a commercial plane I said, “it can’t be.” Commercial planes don’t fly low there. And look at the perfect, crystal clear weather, with not a cloud to be seen. So I knew the rumors were false. Then there were unexplained train delays and more rumors of a commercial plane crashing into one of the towers. Maybe, I thought, there was a mid-air collision involving local airport traffic, and a piece of a plane hit a tower. Such a collision had in fact occurred in the 1960’s, and I had seen some of the wreckage in neighborhoods not far from my boyhood home in Brooklyn.
As we approached Indian Point, where I knew there was a sharp turn in the tracks, I made sure to press my face against the glass in order to be able see the Trade Center to the south. There was smoke coming out of the side of one of the towers, so I knew something must have happened. But the plume of smoke was so small relative to the massive tower, I thought it must have been a small plane that struck and started a small fire.
Then came ominous announcements over the train’s P.A., which at the time seemed deliberately vague. They said something about "a situation." At approximately 10:30 we arrived into Penn Station. When I rushed out to the street I stopped the nearest person wearing an official-looking uniform I could find. "I just got off a train," I said. "What’s going on with the World Trade Center?" "Haven’t you heard," he replied. The second tower just came down."
Late in the day I watched the horrendous footage that the rest of the world had been watching all morning, over and over again. That night, at home, I watched it again. The next year, when MSNBC replayed the entire coverage of the day, as if it were live, I realized something that I had not heard anyone else mention.
From the moment I had seen that commercial jet liner flying low above the Hudson I had been in a state of denial. I was not processing the information, my brain was receiving, correctly. My ability to process my direct sensory input was hampered by my prior knowledge that jet liners do not fly low along the Hudson. The vision of that plane did not fit into my frame of reference. Jet liners do not fly into huge buildings in N.Y. city.
I was not alone in my processing errors. It is a phenomenon that occurred to others also on that day. You can see it on the news coverage. On MSNBC when the south tower (the first tower to come down) collapsed, despite the fact that cameras were trained on the smoking towers and shown without interruption, they did not mention its falling until 20 minutes later when the announcer began to say that he was hearing reports of a tower coming down. Surely, the MSNBC news room had been hearing such reports from the moment the tower fell. But, I imagine, just as I knew that a plane could not possibly have hit the World Trade Center, the news people must have known that reports of the collapse of a tower had to be false.
My point is, "not believing" is "not seeing." Whatever our world view or political model might be, many of us, myself included, tend to see only through the lens of how the information we process fits our world view. We need to fight that tendency and be better than that. Otherwise, powerful interests can exploit this weakness for their gain and for our country’s loss.
Our democracy depends on there being at least a critical mass of analytical, independent thinkers. We used to have that in our news media. But enemies of objectivity have persuaded a great mass of people that the objective media was "liberal" and "lame-stream," and replaced much of it with nonobjective, biased media that fit certain ideologies or advance certain corporate goals and objectives. We need objective, honest news sources that we can depend upon. That’s why I hope that the Coffee Party and others will work toward developing an open-minded, curious, intelligent and independently-thinking electorate. Our country, our democracy, needs more of us to make that shift.
I am so exited about the Enough Is Enough! campaign for a government of, by, for the People in Washington DC launching on Saturday October 29th, 2011. I WILL BE THERE and I want to meet you in person. Come join us and take your country back. Join Egberto in Americans for Racial Equality & Economic Justice at Coffee Party USA and on Facebook at here.
Terry W Broussard says
And yet the blindness of disnelief continues.
We blindly believed that the people who attacked us on 9-11 hated us for our freedom.
We blindly believed that Iraq had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks.
We blindly believed that our security is sancrosanct, and that the rest of the world was / is simply going to roll over and let us have our way
We blindly believed that the patriot act was about enabling the “good guys” to keep tabs on the “bad guys”.
We blindly believed that we could borrow money to fund wars abroad while at the same time decreasing tax revenues AND expanding the government.
We refuse to believe that there are people who will pay any price, endure any burden to enact their revenge against us.
We refuse to believe that the thousands of murders conducted by this country won’t ensure our safety.
We refuse to believe that any opinion or belief other than ours is relevant.
We refuse to believe that NO nation-state or empire has survived once its enemies outnumbered its friends.
We had better collectively undergo lasik before someone has to take out our eyes so that we can see.