Rhetoric aside, maybe we should listen

I understand and sympathize with many of my classmates who felt that Ward Churchill's essay was an attack on America and on our government - but I also think that that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore what he says. His tone aside, Churchill is not the first person to claim that America should have been expecting the September 11 attacks; though he is brazen and sounds a bit maniacal, what Churchill says still holds a lot of weight.

I remember hearing about the attacks on September 11 and initially not quite understanding what they meant, then going back to my dorm room and watching the WTC crumple to the ground. The reality set in then that we were being attacked - something had provoked these people, the Taliban, who I knew nothing about at the time. Churchill is right, at least in my case - I was extremely unaware of my surrounding world. In an English class a few days later the professor asked us what we were thinking; one young man was adamant that the Taliban was just "jealous" of the freedom we held in America, and they were simply bombing us out of spite. The professor somehow managed to keep a straight face, then proceeded to enumerate cases in which the United States had acted unfairly or violently toward Afghanistan and surrounding areas of the world. He suggested that perhaps we weren't seeing human faces over there, perhaps because we didn't care, and that perhaps what we really meant was that since we were Americans we could touch anyone but they could not touch us.

I will go as far as to say that Churchill was not unwise in his tone in this piece - if his purpose was to get a message of warning out to Americans, then the possibility of losing his job will just be a sacrifice for that. He certainly got our attention. Maybe we should look at his sacrifice as an act of kindness, though he calls Americans sheep and other degrading things, and take his advice by paying him a little closer attention.