I’m back!

It was very nice to take a break from school and go home for the first time since August, but we are right back on that work grind and the novel that is kicking off our second term of ASTU is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I just want to start off by saying that I actually really enjoyed this book. This was quite a shocking revelation because generally I find it really difficult to get through course assigned readings. I’ve already recommended it to a few of my friends; it was that good!

That being said, it does not necessarily mean that I enjoyed all of the characters or choices that were made in the novel. For instance, the protagonist, Oskar Schell, would quite often get on my nerves, but I also tend to forget that he is an eight year old boy who recently lost his father. And of course, it is also quite natural for a child so young to process death and the event of 9/11 in very simplified terms.

Oskar is a very smart kid, with a great drive to educate himself on just about everything, but the things that he learns are simply facts, void of emotional attachment or understanding; in that sense, he thinks in very black and white terms. To explain this, I will cite an example from the text. After 9/11, a day which he names “the worst day”, Oskar developed a great deal of phobias related to the terrorist attack. As he lists off things that make him panicky, he mentions “Arab people on the subway (even though I’m not racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other places, […] people with mustaches, […] turbans” (36). Due to the media of the time, Oskar was fed an idea and an image of the enemy, and those people were Arabs, or anyone that looked Arabs, hence the mustaches and turban comment. It is blatant that Oskar is racist, yet he is such a young child when all of this is happening that is it understandable that he is not fully understanding the implications of this fears. By stating that he is “not racist”, he proves that he knows what racism is and that is is undesirable to be considered as such, and yet he still holds these fears.

This response is quite natural, I think, among many young children during this time, and I am sure even among adults who are not so socially conscious. Post 9/11, there was a very strong sense of “us vs. them” and even George W. Bush promoted this kind of cut-and-dry thinking by famously stating, “you’re either with us or you’re with the enemy” (he uses “enemy” and “terrorist” synonymously in many cases).

This kind of thinking is problematic in many ways because it dehumanizes the enemy and categorizes a vastly diverse group of people into one large homogenous group with the label: “terrorist”.

It really makes me wonder about Oskar’s generation, those who are a little older than I am, and how they are currently approaching issues in the Middle East and their current outlook on racial discrimination against Arabs, Muslims, and those who may even choose adorn a mustache. I feel as though because the issue was so close to home, Americans were finally able to victimize themselves: see themselves as the attacked rather than as the attackers. It is a shame that rather than finally being able to sympathize with those that that have made war an everyday reality for, they instead decide to close off their borders and separate themselves even more than before. The intention of my post is not at all to downplay the horrific nature of 9/11, but simply to bring to light some of the issues that were perpetuated after the event and the ways in which the United States made some poor choices in handling the matter.