THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 77

I can remember 9-11 happening. It was a sunny day in the late summer, fall was around the corner. The first plane slammed into the World Trade Center when me & Katie were waking up, listening to our radio alarm getting ready for work in our West Oakland loft. It felt hallucinatory, like the world had been turned upside down. I didn’t know it yet but an illusion I held had been shattered. At the library later that morning I was watching the CNN live stream & the second plane hit. This was pure insanity, I felt a pit in my stomach not because I felt sympathy for America, for New Yorkers who had their reality shattered but because I knew the next step was for the American war machine to gear up & not let this disaster go to waste. I knew what was coming, my lack of sympathy bugged me, I knew that I was wrong. I knew that my fear of American military reprisal over the harm of American lives, any lives, was a mistake. I had gotten in so deep in anti-war, leftism & poison against the GW Bush administration of Neo-cons that I had overlooked the actual reason I was those things in the first place, why I cared. This sort of thing was commonplace in the Punk & Anarchist worlds, people that care so much & are so sensitive lose sight of or don’t even understand those initial seeds & are moved to hatred of the other. We went to a bunch of huge anti-war protests. One of them was actually the biggest anti-war protest in history because it was coordinated in lots of cities worldwide. It was hard to move back from my blame America position when the reaction by the government & even fellow Americans were so obvious, so wrong, so misguided. Eventually I was able to see out of that binary trap & into being able to love my country & understand its problems, not in opposition to the other but to support & understand the one. It is so easy to condemn when you see something wrong, it is much harder to understand something as wrong & comprehend why it happened at the same time. It’s much easier to join a fight, especially if you’ve been punched.