Reflections on Sept 11 (part 1)

First, thanks to the advice of a wise woman, I will henceforth cease from apologizing for my irregular blogging. As this wise woman pointed out, blogging by its very nature is at the wish of the author so it cannot be "late" or "too infrequent" if that's what the blog author decides.

Although the ubiquitous coverage in the past 24 hours of the five year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks - including both ABC's and CBC's "documentaries" which I did not watch - is already long past annoying and its not even noon in Alberta, it is appropriate to reflect from a leadership perspective on what has happened since that tragic day.

1) "Trust" and "leadership" never appear positively in the same sentence.
Watergate and Richard Nixon had pretty much eliminated the words "trust" and "leadership" from being used positively in the same sentence for the last quarter of the 20th century, but as the new millennium dawned, there seemed to be a tinge of hopefulness that respect for those in authority could once again appear, perhaps not in describing a particular nation's leaders but at least in reference to some global leaders, whether in business, politics, religion, NGO's, the media, etc. But 9/11 has pretty much finalized any hope of the "trust" and "leadership" being connected for at least one more generation of humankind.

2) Increase in Religious and Cultural discrimination
Again, the end of the 20th century appeared to be a time of hope as people around the world that "we can all love one another" (whatever that means?). It would appear not... Or at least not without some other underlying impetus/source beyond the fictitious "I'm a good person" idea. Research has been cited in the past few days showing what most of us have discovered and are daring to admit - that we do look suspiciously at people with a different colour of skin, even though we know it is wrong to judge solely on that basis. That we do fear that most Islamic people are terrorists, even though we know better in our moment of sanity. Just as the cultural mindset of North America (and arguably the rest of the world) was rapidly affirming that "tolerance is the greatest virtue" we were jolted back into the reality that every belief system is not "similar" and every culture/religion is not morally good or even morally neutral. Any culture or religion is by its very nature "discriminatory."

To be continued...