Michele Easterday writes magnificently over at LadyBlog.

I was wrong about distance.

Before that day, I thought the terrorists were over there and that was actually fine with me. Bad things happened Over There, because life Over There was harsh and people more prone to violent acts, and The Middle East had been like that forever.

I was wrong about my subject.

I was a cultural relativist. Once upon a time, those humans over there were smaller than me. They were the subjects of frightening documentaries. I wondered how they managed to live in their culture. I was glad it was not mine. I was allowing what I saw of Islam and the Middle East to be clouded by what I had been taught about tolerance, and how I must lie to myself and avoid the ethnocentrism of calling much of the things I saw coming out of the Middle East “ugly”. At the same time I was being told to treat the violent dictators and perpetrators of violence as babies incapable of self-control due to their circumstances.

What do I see now? Well, I lost my “nuance”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under September 11. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.