i’m with maggie

Just a quick note in the midst of editing (and I need my eyes to take a brief break).

There has been a lot of hubbub about comments made by Maggie Gyllenhaal regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Gyllenhaal is starring in one of the first major motion pictures to address 9/11, The Great New Wonderful.

In a recent statement, released by her publicist, she said the following regarding 9/11:

“[September 11 was] an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America’s role in the world. Because it is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict. Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11.”

She’s right on the money: we need to seek out and address the reasons why we were attacked in order to prevent further attacks. It’s that simple.

Yet people have attacked Gyllenhaal for this statement. A fan site dedicated to the actress has been brought to its knees by people posting comments both supporting and attacking Gyllenhaal’s statement, forcing the site’s owner to remove the ability for fans to post commentary. Fox New Channel’s theocon-biased “reporters” and “experts” were calling her a “traitor” on the air, and theocon websites are encouraging boycotts of both Gyllenhaal’s new movie, as well as others she has done in the past.

This is wrong. She was merely exercising her First Amendment rights, nothing more.

What the U.S. has done under the watch of the Bush administration is anything but address the causes of peoples’ and groups’ hatred of our country. We’re still using more and more oil, we’re still running around the world and through the United Nations like bully police, and we’re unwilling to change our ways, from a governmental level. Almost everything we’ve done – the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, the color-coded threat level system and myriad summits – has only treated symptoms, not causes.

So Maggie Gyllenhaal is right to say what she did: we should question ourselves and be a rational society. Getting to yes almost always means meeting somewhere in the middle, not at either extreme. Somebody needs to be brave and make the first move toward peace and understanding, and only through asking the right questions and coming up with the right answers will we make true progress in our misguided “war on terror.”