But the main idea behind the article was based upon the opinions or actions or the people and politicians after the attack. One of the first things that Didion pointed out was how quickly the government began to use the attack, the panic and confusion, to get whatever they wanted. Looking back on it, this is something that could be expected and although it is wrong, it is not all that surprising. What surprised the author (and me) was how quickly that she said people caught on to the governments tactic. In a time of uncertainty like that, I think it would have been difficult for me to step outside the situation and realize that something was trying to take advantage of me. A great example of some of these initiatives was the anti-flag burning movement, and the movement to dictate prayer in school.

However, the government was not the only force that was corrupt during that time. People all over the nation were, and still are, racially profiling and grouping people that look like they came from the middle east. This is common in history during times of war but it is rarely seen in an instance where the opinions of so many people change so quickly. I thought Didion did an excellent job analyzing the situation when she said, “This was a year in which it would come to seem as if we had been plunged at one fell stroke into a pre-modern world. The possibilities of the Enlightenment vanished. We had suddenly been asked to accept-and were in fact accepting-a kind of reasoning so extremely fragile that it might have been based on the promised return of the cargo gods”. This insight is not always easy to see, and I know this because during the first few years after the attack, I was as blind as anyone to just how ignorant I had become about the real situation middle east just because I was afraid. Im not saying that everything was peachy but, largely thanks to the news media, I failed to see the bigger picture.

Finally, I thought that she made an excellent point towards the end of her article when she managed to postulate that a large reason that we are having so many misunderstandings with the middle east was that the government had been crossing many wires for at least 60 years that made confusion and disagreements inevitable. Even though I think that the problem is definitely bigger than just what the government has caused, I think that the process of cleaning up relationships with the middle east, and coming to a social understanding has to start with our government being straight with other countries and its own people, without going behind anyones back.

Pat O’Malley

This drew many opportunists to come in, using the event to push their propoganda on the injured and vulerable Americans.  Those who were trying to make sense of the incodent in economic and social terms were scrutinized for pushing politics at such a sad time.  Those who were trying to combat racism towards Muslims were even scrutinized for their timing.  People were looking for signs, such as the wind during the ceremony for the victims symbolizing “moving on”.  This blame game of infantilizing was know as the “death of irony”, and perhaps the rekindling of reality; the growing up of America.
This goes back to Roosevelt’s presidency, where he made promises that would be impossible to keep without breaking old ones.  His plan was to delay this confliction while reaping the benefits and keeping good in the public eye; “stalling” as the author put it.  This, to me, is a concept that seems to run common through the politics of many leaders, dumping problems on their successors who (along with their country) may be blind to.
An example of this false publicity is when Bush was set up in Jordan looking to be surveying the land, with American flags decorating the scene.
Opportunists used September 11th to push patriotism, and other ideals, that if not followed, would make people look like they they must be “against America”, if not for.  An example of this is the adding of “under God” to the countries most popular patriotic chant when combating the atheist Soviets.
Hussein became the outlet, scapgoat, or “solution” for America’s anger.  Relatives of victim would see this as clossure and wanted to believe killing him was the cure.  America used nuclear weapons as the excuse, but reaped oil benefits.  This confusing war left America to believe what they wanted; what they had to for closure.
Politics will be politics, and people will use tragic events for political gain.  People must be open minded and consider all facts when making decisions, especially those involving heavy emotions.
Use your right to free thought and educate yourself all you can, from as many sources as possible.

Not only is location a contributing factor to the death toll, the poor quality of public transportation and the heavily increase in personal auto use contribute as well. Neither pedestrians nor bikers stand a chance when it comes to the overly crowded streets. Some drivers have been known to go crazy and drive up on curbs or the wrong side of the rode. It was even suggested that drivers undergo psychiatric testing. The public mini buses and jitneys are poorly maintained and are particularly dangerous. I was shocked to read that by 2020 traffic would be the third leading cause of death. In addition to location and traffic, the cause of many deaths in this cities are the diseases that plague these slum-dwellers. These diseases are preventable and come from poor sanitation due to contaminated water supply and/or open sewers. The Overflowing garbage and overflowing sewers are turning these cities into big land masses of waste.

Reading the section about disposal of bodily waste made me appreciate having a working sewage system. I couldn’t imagine defecating outside in the open or in a garbage bag and leaving it on the nearest roof or pathway or having a scheduled time to relieve myself. This book really is an eye opener and makes you realize how fortunate we are and it saddens me to know that knowing these conditions, more help isn’t being provided for these families.

I have a fundamental problem with a large part of this piece.  Especially since she is talking about the States’ reactions immediately after 9/11, I have trouble understanding how she can distance herself from the fact that thousands of people, having lost family members and friends, took the attack very personally.  She openly criticizes efforts by theaters and speakers to be “sensitive” to the American public.  Speaking in empathy for those who had lost someone in the attack, I can understand why some organizations would take a few extra measures to be kind.  I appreciate that Didion seems to think it was exclusively a form of censorship, but I personally feel that at least within the first year, these measures were appreciated and a merciful social nicety. 

That said, there is an excess that has occurred of the “sensitivity”.  I myself remember in middle school, three or four years after the attack, that a friend had her birthday on 9/11 and I had heard a peer ask someting along the lines of, “Should you be happy and celebrate your birthday today since it’s 9/11?”  My friend responded appropriately that she had been born before the tragedy occurred, and could still celebrate.  However a small, petty example this is, it is still a testament to what went on (and is still going on, to a certain extent) in the political world regardig 9/11.  It seemed that as time moved forward, there was an effort to dwell on the initial horror of the event.  Even today, because there have been building plans sent in for the development of a Mosque in the vicinity, a huge fuss has been kicked up.  I can understand both points of view on the subject; the solution can be seen two ways.  The protestors should gain some knowledge and perspective and allow the construction to happen peacefully, or the developers should not have even chosen that location, where they knew it would have attracted this kind of attention.  For the safety of the Mosque attendees, I actually think it’s wisest if they consent to build elsewhere… Angry, hurt people do crazy things.

Returning to the reading, Didion is right that the government did milk the tragedy of 9/11, and manipulate the renewed nationalism to accomplish goals that the current administration had already had in place.  She also took a very practical look at the politics that perhaps caused the attack, and I would say that our country is the ultimate culprit.  With our corrupt politics and unfullfilled promises in place since president Roosevelt, it’s no wonder that we encited some kind of response, to be frank.  Certainly we can’t expect that we can simply take advantage of the Middle East’s situation for years without consequence.

Without a doubt, steps be taken to stop similar attacks in the future, but the question is, what steps?

Tariq Ali and Steven Holms suggest the only way to prevent further attacks is to try to appease the terrorist organizations: withdraw troupes from Islamic countries and  pressure Israelites to stay away from where the Palestinians don’t want them. Had we done this, we might have pleased the terrorists for a while, however I think they would have taken advantage of our withdrawal to set up more schools  and training camps.  As they gained more power, their demands would increase in audacity– Pretty soon they’d be asking us to wipe Israel off the face of the globe and have everyone convert to Islam.

Force and threats are another option for fighting terrorism; however, these things are futile as Steven Holms points out, “Suicidal militants who hate us and want to kill us obviously cannot be deterred by threats.”

Mary Beard of Cambridge suggests that the 991 terrorists were anomalies, and we don’t need to do anything to prevent future attacks. She says “almost the oddest response  [to terrorist attacks] has been our terrified certainty that there remains a plentiful supply of suicide pilots and bombers.”  She says “full-blown martyrs are a rare commodity, much more numerous in the imagination than on the ground.”   She refers to the 911 terrorists as people who have “cut themselves off” from “human nature.” I disagree.

To desire to fight for a virtuous cause,  to desire to please a higher power, to desire 72 virgins and to desire to live forever are all very-human desires.  The terrorists did what they did because they were indoctrinated from boyhood to believe things that were not true. They believed that by blowing themselves up and destroying the world trade towers, they were doing something noble and earning a heavenly reward. Deception—not defective nature—caused them to commit evil.  As long as the Islamic militants who indoctrinated the 911 terrorists are out there indoctrinating others, there WILL be a steady supply of suicide attackers.

….I wish I could end this post by saying what should be done. I cannot do that. My comments on what should not be done—appeasement threats and ‘nothing’– will have to suffice. 

Times were very hard for the slum areas. Things got worse around the 1980s. People kept losing their jobs and the economy was bad.  There were causes of poverty in the 1980s. “Main single cause of increases in poverty was the retreat of the state”

Urban areas of Africa and Latin America were hit by the degression the IMF and this cause protracted drought, rising oil prices, soaring interest rates, and falling commodity prices. The third world areas dealt with more and more immigrations, labor issues, and bad revenues.

Taxation was caused by the IMF and world banks. Latin America had issues. Urban poverty in Latin America went up.

During the 1990s trade started to get larger at a fast rate. The inputs of production became cheaper. Economic conditions started to get a little better.  Globalization caused success and better jobs in China. Cities in China started to become unequal.

Slums all around the world may get better and the poor could come out of the hard times. Nobody ever said that things have to stay bad and not ever be good. No matter how bad a slum is it still has some good qualities.

The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) was a program that reached to improve, but instead amounted up to a disaster, destroying the “old soul of Lagos and ‘re-enslaving’ urban Nigerians.” It was to restore life to the economy, fixing it up and making places better by improving the affected cities, but it in return drove middle-class residents out and leaving in its path destruction and an immense population of poor individuals. Whereas the World Bank and IMF somewhat was trying to help the people who lived in slums by removing subsidies and enforcing health and education, SAPs just eliminated subsidies and forced them “sink or swim” into global markets that were dominated heavily by subsidized First World agribusinesses. This was just a way that produced more debt hanging from the poor’s shoulders, treating Third World countries with different rules than the wealthy, forcing away growth for them to prosper from. Third World cities resulted in vast amounts of rising immigration, decreasing employment, fallen wages and nonetheless, collapsed revenues. It seemed like there was no saving the Third World, taking away from them any type of public health enforcement due to the increase in population. It seems arrogant to me that these SAPs produced these programs that left the Third World in basically ruins, raising the bar for more poverty, more poor and more slums. It’s sad to read about this happening to any country and that there is pretty much nothing you can do to stop it. Davis includes that people across the continent accustomed to saying “I have the crisis” in the most common way that someone says, “I have a cold.”

The 1980’s were a tough time for the Third World, resulting in the decline of male formal employment opportunities, leaving the women with even greater hardships, because they were forced to work inside AND outside of the home to make ends meet and compensate their losses from the male figure of the house not being able to acquire a job. Limited access to education and healthcare accumulated, leaving people sick and helpless in these countries. Women were expected to carry the weight of the burden, because their husbands or fathers couldn’t work, so they had to pick up the slack by accommodating jobs, anything that would make a little money. This singled them out to few jobs, either as vendors on the street, selling liquor, being hairdressers, cleaning and washing for other people, making a living from sewing, becoming nannies, and worst of all, turning to prostitution; it enrages me that these women had to suffer in these ways. Now I’m not saying that men didn’t suffer as well, because I totally think what happened to them by having zero job opportunities was terrible as well as demoralizing, but to put it all on the women to work and take care of their family, and to have to resort to prostitution if need be? It’s crazy and disgusting. On top of women trying to fend for their families while the men remained idle and jobless, living conditions as well as children’s nutrition declined; a man named Moser found that “almost 80 percent of the barrio’s children suffered from malnutrition,” – how devastating is that? Everything that was saved up and used before this happening structured support and mobility for families, but now they were left with having to use their resources that were saved up to survive. Even children were forced to drop out of school, receiving hardly if any education, to work and make an income; some were even sent back to the countryside to save money on rent or people pooled to save money by regrouping independent family members back to the same house to have a larger income to pay for their things. “What may once have been a unit that supported and sustained its members has now become a unit in which members compete for survival.”

Riots were manifested during the 1970’s and 1980’s, some as food riots and others as riots that turned violent. Outbreaks occurred whenever fuel prices raised or having to pay fares to take the bus increased; during Caracazo, a ton of people came down from their barrios to “loot shopping centers, burn luxury cars, and build barricades.” As a result, 400 people were killed. It really saddens me to think that this was what our world had come to, and it wasn’t even that long ago that events like these occurred! To this day, I’m sure riots and protests in Third World countries still are maintained, leaving people dead just because they’re fighting for something that needs to be changed. Even today, they suffer from repercussions due to the SAPs; more than 40 countries are poorer today than they were before, obviously showing that something needs to happen to fix what’s happening to our world, but what? What could even be done by now that wasn’t already tried in the past? All these occurrences resulted in more slums, more poverty, more squatters, more unstable living conditions, more abandoned buildings, etc.

AND when there seemed like there was any inkling of growth of any kind, accompanied with it was, of course, some sort of decline. Improvements that were created were from the huge neoliberal restructure of the Indian economy that produced a “high-tech boom and stock-market bubble” in these cities: Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai. The “GDP grew at 6 percent during the 1990’s, while the capitalization of the Bombay Stock exchange doubled almost every year – and one result was one million new millionaires, many of them Indian engineers and computer scientists.” This growth accumulated public interest and attention because of its positive aspect for the country and the local social scientists and social-justice activists used this to divert attention towards something that was also going on, the morbid growth in poverty. From the attention received due to the boom, 56 million paupers arrived in India, which wasn’t a positive turnout for them, because of food grain prices raising and amounting up to a 58 percent difference between the years of 1991 and 1994. It goes to show, in my opinion, that people flock to improvement, they flock to something that seems like a positive outcome that could happen to even them at the worst times, but it only produced more hardships and more decline in economic growth for India as a whole.

Slums will continue to grow, and have grown twice as fast as the general population, but merely nothing can be done or will be done. It just really irks me, as I read this book, to realize what it’s like in other countries and goes to show that we have it good. It made me really appreciate SO much more everything that I have and made me wish that there was something we could do to help.

And while that particular fact, that a human’s environment impacts his or her ability to survive comfortably (or at all), seems harmless enough, when coupled with the idea that the state, the appointed (or not) steward of the people, is systematically pushing people further and further to the peripheries of cities and society, one of two uncomfortable conclusions must be drawn: either, the state does not actually know the socioeconomic origin of the slum (read: necessity) and therefore should not be put in charge of even one person, let alone thousands, or the city is purposefully uprooting those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum for what amounts to little more than an aesthetic slight against the booming bodies of their respective cities. The point at which the survival of many, less fortunate people is disregarded due to the comfort and luxury of the few is the point at which one must question the ethical (or intellectual) capacity of those in positions of power.

But can we criticize the treatment of slums without criticizing the system that brought them into existence and the system that sustains them? Imperialism initially separated the “conqueror” from the “conquered” by creating physical partitions that separated the occupant “invaders” from the indigenous people of the land they had taken over. Luckily, imperialism, at least as it is traditionally conceptualized, has been abandoned, but is there a performative difference between the system of imperial colonialism and the system of capitalism when it comes to slums? It is precisely the pursuit of capital (or the inability to pursue it) that allows an increasing gap to form between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” a pursuit in which we are all involved.

How can we, from the belly of our systemic beast, decry the very mechanisms by which we are allowed to study, the system which has, in its own way, brought to our attention the issue of slums in the first place? It is precisely the jockeying for position brought about by international economic competition that makes the “beautification” of cities worldwide an acceptable practice, nothing less than an incentive for ruthlessness. While colonialism erected the cities and separated the poor from the rich, capitalism entrenches and metastasizes slums by making one’s livelihood dependent upon capital, a translation into seemingly limitless wealth of what actually amounts to a finite supply of resources. Is it possible, in a world where the continuous accumulation of capital has been made the end-all be-all goal of existence on a systemic level, to develop a theory of economics or politics that can be functionally implemented to alleviate the burden of slumdwellers? That is to ask, how does one expect to raise one half (the bottom) of the equation without creating another, subjectively “bad” lower half of society?

In what space can such a relationship occur, absent the purely theoretical organization of every human in a city into a sphere that is equidistant from the figurative “center of opportunity?” If every human were to have equal opportunity in our theoretical sphere, the sphere would need to be widened, each and every human being displaced, every time an additional human took the city as his or her residence. It logically follows that each new addition to the city would bring the collective populace farther and farther from the “center of opportunity,” or, put another way, that equality could not be guaranteed to each and every citizen in terms of opportunity without making opportunity less readily available to every other citizen every time a new addition was made to our equation. At some point, the sphere would become so big as to make living in our spherical city a practical impossibility for all of its inhabitants, and so we are left with two possible courses of action: either, we allow inequality and its implications (implications that increase in magnitude of severity relative to the number of people who migrate to live in the city), or we create our theoretical sphere cities, but put a cap on the total number of people who can live in a particular city before the creation of a new, sustainable socioeconomic sphere-city can be constructed.

Perhaps we have erred by allowing unfettered migration into cities without the capacity to sustain such large numbers of people. Perhaps new centers for economic opportunity should be built on the periphery of the slums as focal points for their impoverished populations to seek their livelihoods and, theoretically, improve their lot and land.

 John Cantwell served from 1917-1947. He gave sanctuary to Mexican refugees, but according to Davis, he treated them condescendingly (330). During his office, some of the Mexican parishes used the archdiocese as a base for a bloody guerrilla war (331). This probably made it more difficult for other Latinos to win the church’s trust and attain positions of leadership.

The next archbishop was a former Wall Street businessman Francis McIntyre. McIntyre was sharp with finances, and politically well-connected (333). However, he was not a kindhearted or spiritual man. McIntyre used fear to manipulate his priests. Moreover, he tried to force the nuns at the Immaculate Heart Of Mary convent to abandon their social activism (333). This lead to a mass exodus of nuns leaving the archdiocese to serve in underground churches (334). By the end of his reign, McIntyre had alienated so many people with his tyranny,that the church split in half (334).

Timothy Manning, a soft-spoken young man, succeeded McIntyre as archbishop in 1946. Manning was everything that his predecessor was not: he was humble, sympathetic, and moderate. He was the first Latino to become Archbishop and he enacted a long list of reforms which Davis says revitalized his congregation (336). Nevertheless he failed to stand up for Latino children who were being mistreated in the archdiocese’s schools (338). During this time, Many Latino families left the catholic church and joined evangelical churches, where minorities were accepted and allowed to hold positions of leadership (340).

The archbishop Roger Mahony came to power in 1968 (341). Davis criticizes Mahony for a variety of things including, expanding the power of his office and undermining the autonomy of the church; requiring that only catholic religious doctrines be taught in catholic schools (341); being pro-life; underpaying his employees (358-359) ; failing to join Father Luis Oliver in civil disobedience and give sanctuary to illegal immigrants (356-357), and treating Catholics intolerantly when they disagreed with him on social issues (see whole chapter) . Davis also accuses Mahony of hypocrisy in his pro-life position, because he does not allow his archdiocese to hand out condoms or educate people about ‘safe sex’. (362-363). Personally, I think it is ludicrous expect a Catholic archbishop to endorse ‘safe sex’ education and to let the archdiocese hand out condoms, since the Catholic Church teaches people to be chaste. Those who obey the teachings of the church can protect themselves from STDs, and those who do not should be able to get condoms from other sources. If ‘safe sex’ education is important to Davis, then he should start a nonprofit and hand out the condoms himself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ note: I thought by changing status to ” pending review” visibility to “public” and the publish-line to ” immediately” meant that I had submitted the post, that it was waiting for the professor to ‘review’ it, and that it would be pubished ‘immediately’ once it was approved. .. apparently pending means something else and there is another ” publish” button.  

You’d think I would have figured things out after I accidentally saved my first post as a draft.  I noticed  that it was just a draft, hit some sort of button that appeared,  and the draft was posted– there was no  ‘pending review’ stage. 

Sorry to everyone who was supposed to comment on my posts, which I failed to post on time.