FOCUS
Sept. 11 showed much of world how self-centered Americans are
By Brad Lendon
Advertiser News Editor
Americans are so self-absorbed, they said.
We needed to look beyond our own borders, they said, see the real human condition. They were sick of watching CNN reporters tell them about how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had "changed the world."
They were African journalists in an editing class I taught in Tanzania in January. The attacks of 9/11 changed nothing for them.
Those from Kenya and Tanzania knew very well what terrorists were capable of. The U.S. embassies in those countries were bombed in 1998, resulting in 260 deaths. Only a dozen of those killed were Americans.
Those from Rwanda knew the horror of genocide, neighbors hacking to death neighbors, 800,000 or more slaughtered in a few months in 1994.
Courtesy Brad Lendon
Those from Burundi knew years of ethnic civil war, with hundreds of thousands killed.
Children peddle wicker chairs and vendors sell their fruits and vegetables at a roadside market in Arusha, Tanzania.
All knew the tragedy of a continent ravaged by AIDS and hunger, a continent where children of grade school age are forced into rebel armies and taught to rape and maim, where a volcano can bury a city of half a million people as happened in the Congo earlier this year.
The 3,000 deaths in our county on Sept. 11, 2001, were dwarfed by millions of dead in decades of suffering.
Last month, as we planned Advertiser coverage for the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, I thought back to what my African students said. And I thought about my own life since the attacks. After the initial shock, my life quickly went back to normal. I do the same things I did before the attacks. Work, play, travel, I do nothing different, make no special allowances — all is the same as before 9/11.
In Tanzania in January and during a trip to Japan in July, I realized I felt no different than most people on this planet.
During my visit to Tokyo, things seemed little changed from when I visited a year earlier, although I did notice more vacant storefronts. Japanese told me those had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and everything to do with an economy that can't shake years of stagnation. They gave that, too, as the reason they were traveling in fewer numbers. They are fearful of losing their jobs, not their lives to terrorists. America's problems are not Japan's.
Motoko Hayashi, a friend who visited Hawai'i from Tokyo during the summer, said her visit here was evidence enough that the terrorism had minimal effects.
Hayashi's husband, who runs an auto repair and retailing business, said the attacks hadn't affected his life at all.
In Tanzania, I saw a lot of people in homes without windows and doors, kids without shoes playing on dusty, unpaved streets or on rocky patches of scrub — and often offering smiles and a wave to me.
Talking to the African journalists during that trip, I heard much about American arrogance, about our refusal to try to see the world through eyes other than our own.
They talked about U.S. reaction to the Rwanda genocide, how the same country that came to the aid of Kuwait in 1991 refused to take an armed stand against wholesale slaughter three years later. Of course, Rwanda had no oil and no money, they said. Those are the filters we used to determine what "changed the world." Real people beyond our shores change nothing, mean nothing.
Bloomberg News Service
They talked about how they all knew someone with AIDS, someone who had died of AIDS, the many funerals of AIDS victims they had attended.
Job seekers visit an employment center in Tokyo. Most Japanese are more worried about continued economic woes than terrorists.
They asked me why Americans were so stingy, why we choose to bring our wealth to bear on things military, not things humanitarian.
To be sure such opinions had not changed in the eight months since I was in Africa, last week I asked a colleague there to check with some real people.
The reaction of Kasiri Wilson, a 35-year-old taxi driver in Arusha, Tanzania, was typical: "When they bombed us here, in Tanzania and Kenya ... all they (Americans) cared about was their people and documents. Nine-eleven was so sad, but Americans needed to learn a lesson. They need to know that the world is not about them.
"Unless the ordinary people stop supporting their arrogant yet very ignorant leaders, they will be the ones to suffer."
And to be sure those attitudes prevail beyond Africa, I asked a colleague in England to poll a few citizens of America's oldest, staunchest ally. Did they believe America has a myopic view of the world?
"Yes, very," said Terry Loveday, 40, a plumber in London. "Everything is about them, as if they are the whole of the world."
Colin King, 51, a computer systems trainer, was less suspect of American people, harsher on the same U.S. media that ignited anger among my African students.
"I don't know if it's people not being informed or if it's people swallowing what they're being given on the news," he said.
"When I have been in the States, watching the telly, I was amazed at the international news. There would be 45 minutes of news about the town, then five on America and one on the rest of the world," King said.
On Feb. 3 of this year, at the top of American news was the Super Bowl. Adam Vinatieri, placekicker of the New England Patriots, said his team "shocked the world" when they beat the St. Louis Rams. Adam, the world doesn't care, doesn't know who you are, wasn't shocked, hasn't changed.
On the same day, 20 people died in guerrilla fighting in the Philippines, 17 died in rioting in Nigeria, and, according to United Nations estimates, about 4,000 people in southern Africa died of AIDS.
Four thousand.
That number should shock us.
That is how the world is changing. Sadly, painfully, daily. In those dusty, one-room homes.
America's losses pale.
Brad Lendon spent three years as a journalist in Japan and has traveled in Africa and throughout Southeast Asia. Reach him at blendon@honoluluadvertiser.com.
