A twisted sense of superiority explains acts of hatred

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9: How could anybody happily drive jet airliners into office buildings and deliberately kill thousands of innocent people?

I know. You know. We all know.

We know because we’ve all been guilty of the same thing — the absolute conviction that we are superior and we are right, and the other people are wrong.

Now hopefully we have never done anything remotely approaching the enormity of the terrorist attacks 10 years ago on September 11.

But most of us have hurt other people, with a clear conscience – sometimes physically, but more often psychologically or economically — because we felt they weren’t as good as us.

There are many public manifestations of this phenomenon in Bermuda society.

You certainly see it in politics, especially at election time, where the truth is bent or broken and Bermudians are encouraged and cajoled to hate and distrust other Bermudians.

You find it in tensions and hatreds and employment prejudices foreigners and locals often have for each other. (Does Government not have enough money left to spray paint over the anti-Filipino graffiti in bus shelters?)

It’s there in Bermuda’s gang rivalries and gun deaths.

The consequences are with us every day in racial inequity and divisions.

Each of us has a duty to do the best we can for our country and our fellow man, but only a few people have the core goodness it takes to make it central to their daily lives.

Yet each of us, I think, has a duty and also the time and ability to realize that we are not innately right and that, anyway, people have the right in most cases to be wrong if they want to be, as long as they don’t hurt anybody doing it.

The terrible events of September 11th, 2001, were shocking and confusing to many of us.

Bad people

It was a challenge to parents like myself to explain, lamely, to their young children that there are bad people on this earth who, fortunately, are far outnumbered by the good.

People wanted to do something, though, to hit back at terrorists or at least prevent future attacks. And if we couldn’t do something effective, at least we could do something that looked impressive and made us feel better.

Sometimes it was effective, and sometimes it was just ridiculous.

The Bermuda Regiment was summoned to protect the Hamilton docks. The fact that they had no bullets in their guns, as we learned later, probably increased our safety even more.

An impressive number of terrorist leaders have been captured and, for the most part, killed. An impressive number of terrorist attacks have been foiled while they were still being planned.

But the ordinary lives of ordinary travellers have been disrupted and inconvenienced by long slow lines, ridiculous searches and shoe-removal exercises. This has not been a good for Bermuda’s tourism, which depends on its closeness to United States. Early check-in times and long security lines that have turned a quick hop into a long ordeal for tourists and international business travellers.

Invasion of Iraq

One of the most remarkable and alarming consequences of the September 11 terrorist attacks, of course, was the invasion and war in Iraq.

It was based on the erroneous — and wilfully misleading — premise that Iraq was somehow involved in the attacks, and also that it possessed and was willing to use “weapons of mass destruction.”

The shocking thing here was that the American and British leaders were guilty of the precise faults of the terrorists of September 11.

They were arrogantly convinced of their own rightness, dismissive of evidence that did not support their views, and deaf to opposing opinions and committed, as a result,

Today, 10 years after the attacks, there are still important lessons to be learned.

I hope we are better at protecting ourselves and our world, and more alert to the dangers around us.

I hope we will learn to be realistic and balanced about those dangers, and not give terrorists that satisfaction of seeing us devoured by our fears.

But I hope, as well, that we can be more alert to the danger that lurks within ourselves.

It is the deadly trait of self-satisfied superiority, that self-righteousness that lets us excuse ourselves for doing things that are wrong.

If we can overcome this, we will give ourselves the best protection against terrorist attacks that money can buy – a healthy, happy and fair society.