Tragedy & resilience. Cycles & ethnicities.

As I write this it is not yet September 11th in America. I was in the US the year the tragic events happened and a country's view of security and insulation changed. A friend of mine had just flown in to LAX with her two young children. Some of my early thoughts were of them. How would she cope if she got stuck with no flights going and all rental cars already taken?

For a nearly exhaustive list of 9/11 related sites. go to 911blogger.com. I don't endorse the sight, but can see the wealth of info available thru the list of links.

Now the questions are more along the lines of How have the office workers, delivery personnel, emergency response personnel and the average New Yorker & Pentagon worker coped since then? What of the families of those who did not survive? Friends visited NYC this past week and saw the sights. I wonder what they will have to say about the feel of the city now; changed but moved on somewhat?

The following summary is by Matthew Tull, PhD, About.com January 25, 2009

Proximity to tragedy As would be expected, people who were in closer proximity to the attacks have been found to have higher rates of PTSD. In particular, 20% of people who lived below Canal Street in New York City (which is close to the World Trade Center) were found to have PTSD following the attacks.

Rates of PTSD in Relief Workers Another study looked at 109 mental health relief workers who went to Ground Zero for one week during the first 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. This study found that relief workers showed signs of PTSD as a result of direct and indirect exposure to traumatic events at Ground Zero.Specifically, it was found that 4.6% of relief workers had PTSD as a result of hearing stories from survivors of the attacks. A slightly higher percentage (6.4%) had PTSD as a result of direct exposure to stressors at Ground Zero.

PHOTO: A 60-ton, 36-foot steel beam — the last to be removed from ground zero — was returned to the World Trade Center site, where it will be a part of the permanent exhibition at the 9/11 memorial museum.

My Uncle Tom lived in NYC for many years, first going there to visit the 1964 World's Fair,
which was held just before America entered a chaotic era of war, struggles for civil rights, and economic uncertainty. Some reports label it an "optimistic period." I'm thinking a comparative study of what was being written about politics and current events then, and now, would be interesting. Seems we cycle around.

Check out Yeat's perspective on cycles of history, with many links to pursue. I got lost, but enjoyed my dip.

The paradigm of the gyres and the cycles that they represent applies to every process, including the wider sweep of history. Like the harmonics of a plucked string, many different lengths of cycle co-exist within the overall cycle, each with its distinctive periodicity, so that at any one time each will be at its own stage of progress. Of particular importance within his treatment of the historical process are the cycles of roughly four thousand years, two thousand years and one thousand. An eight-thousand-year cycle exists but stretches too far back into pre-history to be useful, and the cycles of five hundred years and less begin to become too detailed for Yeats’s broad and impressionistic treatment.

Yeats is not alone in discerning a cyclical pattern history, and such cycles are present in several ancient traditions, most notably Hinduism. In modern European tradition, Agrippa’s friend, the Abbot Trithemius, citing ancient precedent, expounded a cyclical series of epochs, governed by the seven planetary archangels, in ‘Concerning the Seven Secondary Intelligences’ (1508; another web-site gives the text), a scheme which was adopted in the twentieth century by Rudolf Steiner. A particularly influential scheme was proposed by Giambattista Vico in The New Science (1725; 3rd ed., 1744; another site’s English comment and Italian text (at present only partial) here), which starts from a scheme of development based on three ages attributed to ancient Egyptian doctrine. A more philosophical and abstract theory appears in G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822-1831) and The Philosophy of History (1837; another site’s text), and in the twentieth century the most widely known scheme is probably Oswald Spengler’s in Decline of the West (1918-1922; translated 1926-29; another site’s selections). Though Yeats did not know Spengler’s work when he published the first version of A Vision, he may have had an acquaintance with Vico’s and possibly with Hegel’s, and he studied them all in more depth as he prepared for the second edition, along with Flinders Petrie’s The Revolutions of Civilisation (1911), Hermann Schneider’s The History of World Civilization (translated 1931) and Henry Adams’ The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) (see AV B 261). More important and significant for him, however, was the astrological tradition of the ‘The Great Year of the Ancients’ (viz AV B Book IV, 243ff.), related to the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, and it is this major cycle that determines the actual lengths of the periods involved. AV B = A Vision, Yeats, (London: Macmillan, 1962).

Everywhere I go in the world I hear stories of migration, discrimination, power shifts, political upheaval, the call for change and the struggle for the newcomers to find employment. Those conversations are taking place in the South Pacific, Africa, North America, Europe and across Asia. Those who have had the jobs don't want the newcomers to take them, but the established community doesn't necessarily want those menial jobs themselves. Consider the following story that did not make the headlines in 2001.

From The Huffington Post Customs officer Jose Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was supposed to be on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Probably because of the shorthanded muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists.

"Melendez-Perez did this at great personal risk, because his colleagues and his supervisors told him, 'You can't do this. This guy is an Arab ethnic. You're racially profiling. You're going to get in real trouble, because it's against Department of Transportation policy to racially profile.'

"He said, 'I don't care. This guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes.' As he sent this guy back out of the United States, the guy turned around to him and said, 'I'll be back.' You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We captured him in Afghanistan.

So a man of Latino descent, judging from his name, stopped an Arab ethnic from participating in a tragedy that killed approximately 2,669 United States citizens and 329 foreign nationals including two from New Zealand.