How Hell Broke Loose Worldwide Before and Since September 11

What was the primary driver in the global upheaval worldwide leading to September 11 and continues to this day?

This is a particularly tough question I was asked for so many answers can be right and as the reader examines the query, he or she may think they have the absolute correct response only to realize it comes across as a simplistic answer to a complex problem. Someone who considers himself politically conservative is going to think it through differently from his liberal counterpart; for the centrists among us, we have to decipher through both sides of fluff to find a concrete reply.  

I think the rise of misinformation, or what we consider today as fake news, as the catalyst for how hell has broken loose since September 11, 2001. For most of us, suicide bombers were a figment of the imagination and/or something that belonged somewhere else far away. How could someone feel so hopeless in his life station that for a dowry, he’d kill himself and take a large number of innocent souls with him? It’s what we’ve tried to reasonably grasp since that fateful day nearly sixteen years ago. We are now cognizant of Saudi Arabia-based al-Jazeera showing news that was a bit too real for our eyes and as its American channel ceased from cable news a year ago, the violence there still has not stopped. I can easily blame the major media (CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, etc.) for keeping us blind and almost entitled to a Teflon Don mentality that because we are the United States of America, no one would dare try to touch us. As conflict happened worldwide in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, Sudan, and so forth, we looked at it passively because that kind of stuff happened so far away from us. Men who have been displaced in a world that has left them behind need a culprit for their pitiful lots in the world, and many of them blame the West for their problems as the world surrounding them became increasingly secular and portrays them as a bunch of traveling nomads who are holding a grip to a false religion that resembles more of a cult to our eyes than what Islam really stands for. As the times change, their yearn for a simpler misogynistic period (like America in some aspects, if not the whiter ones) outweighs their interrupted traditional way of life; combine that with how quickly information moves and the blatant and covert imperialism America continues to this date and the sheer destitute of their situations, no wonder these young men act out and radicalized into extremism.

Fundamental religion does that to people – and Christians are not exempt from this fact. Proof that comes from the rise of the Religious Right; their original fight was not against abortion, but they saw (and some still view it as such) school integration as the unifying cause to rally around. Think about all of the lily-white private schools that opened throughout the South during the 1960s and early 1970s, many of which receive federal dollars thanks to state legislatures which allowed for “academies” to exist.

Until September 11, Americans were simply misled by the media with implicit help from the government. Once those planes hit the Twin Towers at 8:46 am, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania, we were jolted into a different circumstance of being not only the world’s policeman but also directly feeling the pain so many have suffered from for so long.  Because we have been insulated from anything possibly happening on our own shores for so long, it was a complete shock to see a bad movie come to life and more to witness three thousand people lose their lives such as the man who jumped out of a window only holding his dog or those who were trapped in elevators and stairways as the buildings crashed to the ground. I don’t know about anyone else, but those photographs are still tough to view even to this date.  

In other words, the families or larger corporate groups that own the media organizations are the ones that control the slant of how it is presented to the masses and they are to be either praised or blamed in the pursuit not of accurate but of having the breaking news. We live in a world where speed really matters more than the actual truth, and depending on the news source, a retraction more than likely of a falsehood will be merely swept under the rug or scrubbed from a news cycle and website.