Important Note: this blog post is non-canon, meaning Tails doesn't actually write it in the Concepts stories themselves. However, I just felt this was a good medium to allow a Sonic character to address this timely anniversary.
9/11
So I learned that today's the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I looked it up, and it does seem to have been a horrifying day. Sonic himself also felt sick watching the old news footage.
It made me wonder though, why did they do this? And why does it still rile so many people up nowadays?
I looked some of the info surrounding it, going back to US operations in the Middle East during the Cold War, what went in Afghanistan in the 80s, things like that. Then I read about what happened soon after the attacks, in Iraq and Afghanistan again, the perpetrators, the conspiracy theories, etc. The scenes of war in the region made us feel sick too.
After all that Sonic and I were left feeling kinda conflicted. I'm not sure what to think, morally. It's reminiscent of events we've heard of on Mobius too, except on an even bigger scale. I don't even know who the bad or good guys are at all. On the internet, you get wildly different and emotional responses to those questions.
So I asked Alan what he thought about all this, since as an FBI agent he can be considered to be someone indirectly involved in the War on Terror, and was directly involved once by being sent to Afghanistan shortly after the attacks.
He admitted to me that he believed America has made mistakes both before and after 9/11, but also added it doesn't change the fact that there are dangerous people out there that still try to perform attacks here. He said that it's their choice to go down this route of violence, and his job is to stop them.
Additionally he said he has never been in a position to make any decisions regarding what America does other than voting, and that he never will be. He also told us felt enraged at the Taliban after seeing what they did in Afghanistan, so in the end he declared to us:
'Maybe America has to apologize for our past and present actions,' he said, 'but me personally? No. Not a damn thing. So I'm going to continue to do what I do. Much like both of you do. And hey, at least many of us do apologize for this. Try finding a terrorist that does the same.'
I get his point. It just seems to be an unsettling cycle of violence to me, with each side motivated by vengeance and hatred, which just gets worse every time one side strikes and the other responds. 9/11 is merely the most infamous part of a decades-long cycle. I just wish none of this had to happen at all.
Spoiler warning: next post refers to events in Chapter 5 of Concepts 2.