Perspective

I work in Washington, D.C. and live in Arlington, VA, so I don't want, in any way, to minimize the lives that were lost and damaged by the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Arlington was declared a disaster area; almost everyone knew someone who was in the Pentagon when the plane hit. But perhaps some perspective would be a good thing.

In Endgame, Derrick Jensen makes the point that Americans appear to believe that "the lives of people killed by foreign terrorists are more worthy of notice, vengeance, and future protection than those killed, for example, by unsafe working conditions, or by the turning of our total environment into a carcinogenic stew. Let's say that three thousand people died in those attacks. In no way do I mean to demean these lives once presumably full of love, friendship, drama, sorrow, and so on, but more Americans die each month from toxins and other workplace hazards, and more Americans die each week from preventable cancers that are for the most part direct results of the activities of large corporations, and certainly the results of the industrial economy. The lack of outrage over these deaths commensurate to the outrage expressed over the deaths in the 9/11 bombing reveals much -- if we care to reflect on it -- about the values and presumptions of our culture."

The difference in outrage springs, I think, from Jensen's Fourth Premise: Civilization is based on a clearly[-]defined and widely[-]accepted[,] yet often unarticulated[,] hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower on the hierarchy is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

The violence done by corporations to large groups of Americans and to our environment is invisible and not the cause of outrage because it is done by those higher on the hierarchy (the wealthy who make money off of these practices) to those lower on the hierarchy (working Americans, women who get breast cancer, etc.) The terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, were done by those lower on the hierarchy (brown people, foreigners, non-xians) to those higher on the hierarchy (mostly white people, Americans, xians). Thus, that violence is regarded, in Jensen's words, "with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."

We've spent billions and billions of dollars "responding" (foolishly and ineffectively) to 9/11 -- money spent on everything from increased "security" at airports to bombing Iraq. When are we going to spend the same amount of money responding to the violence done to working Americans and to our environment? And if we're not going to respond to that violence, can we really pretend to be living in anything except a patriarchy?