Sept. 11 lesson

I'm teaching a lesson on Sept. 11...which is today. It's been a pretty subdued lesson. Today, I'm bombarding the kids with photos and videos of the attacks. I'm giving them all the gorey details about the loss of life and impact on Americans. Tomorrow, the lessons gonna be more "motive" based. Why did this happen? type of questions. My students, I predict, will have intriguing responses.

Today, one particular questions/comment made me freeze in that momentary system overload I experience when truly caught off guard. "Have you ever thought like Osama bin Laden? I mean, have you ever thought about it from his perspective? It is similar, I think, to how the Koreans fought against Japanese occupation. We did similar acts against the Japanese, but we were fighting against our oppressors."

Huh.
(It's times like these that my response can only be the "huh" sound, indicating my system restart.)

You guessed it, I'm assigning an essay topic.

Personally, before planning this lesson, I didn't even know the flight numbers of the hijacked planes. I didn't know the nationalities of all the hijackers. I didn't know half of the conspiracy theory shit that is out there. Frankly, after spending hours putting together a powerpoint of the human tragedy, I clenched my fist in rage at the audacity of some of those conspiracy theories. The government planted explosives and blew up the Towers just because they wanted to fight a war in the Middle-East? Ugh, it made me sick. I mean, while reading through the Google hits, it made me viscerally ill. It is fascinating to look back and wonder, "Would I have had the same reaction if I were in the States?" I think most of it was manifested by the fact that I had sat for hours absorbing gruesome and morbid images and videos. I couldn't fathom a nation deliberately inflicting this pain on its own people...well, maybe I couldn't fathom OUR nation deliberately doing so. I'm going to ponder this a bit.