Sontag's "9/11" and "A Few Weeks After"

1. What is the best, most productive response to a tragedy such as 9/11?
2. What are the true goals of terrorists?
3. What were the true goals of the Bush administration's foreign policy?

I was very young when the tragedy happened; only 6 years old, in fact. I don't remember the exact moment I learned what had happened but I vividly recall the days following it. I sat at my desk in my elementary school classroom and thought about it constantly, drawing the horrifying scene in my head and, more often than not, imagining myself and the people I loved in the smoldering wreckage. I wasn't thinking about the people who did it, but rather fixated on the victims. The lives lost, forever. Even at that age I was able to draw the connection between knowing people had died and knowing that people, real human beings with dreams and families and pets and friends had been ripped from the earth, and that it could have so easily been someone I loved stolen away.

As a child, preoccupied with a developing appreciation for the innate value of human life and, in a very real sense, lost in my own empathy, my only response to the tragedy was a lot of crying and hugging. Appropriate for my age, most likely, but not a response that would be appropriate of, say, the leaders of the free world's "superpower." If I had been older when it happened, I might have turned to political leaders, watching them carefully to see how they reacted. I would have wanted empathy from them, of course. I would want to see them grieving. But I would also want to see them thinking, figuring out why the tragedy happened and how similar atrocities could be prevented in the future; and, of course, I'd want to see all good ideas followed through. Real, concrete action based on solid, rational thought.

What Sontag seemed to see in America's leaders, however, was little more than rhetoric, or what she called "confidence-building and grief management." She saw all the leaders from different political factions come together and offer meaningless comfort to a grieving nation that likely needed more action. Sontag said, "Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy." While I'm a huge fan of psychotherapy in many situations, I would have to agree with Sontag that it was not what our nation needed. After all, if a soldier loses his leg on the battlefield, it is probably more important to give him a tourniquet than an Advil.