By Alycia Smith

It seems that it’s after any large-scheme tragedy that American propaganda truly works its best (or worst). “They hate us because we are free.”This is the phrase I saw plastered over the news only hours after last Tuesday’s horrific events. Spoken even by Colin Powell himself, this seems to be the current response to the often-asked question: “why?”

I urge all readers to turn off their televisions for a moment. No, really. Turn off CNN for a minute, mute Tom Brokaw for a second, and sit down for a while and THINK. I promise it won’t hurt. Much.Picture, if you would, a small child, perhaps a little third grade girl, sitting with her mother as the pictures race across their television screen. The same footage plays and replays over and over, the same airplane making its way clear through one of the World Trade Center Towers, her small eyes transfixed by the explosion that follows the craft out the opposite end from which it entered. Sooner or later she loses interest in the repetitions and turns to her mother.

“Mommy, why?”

Here it makes sense to dull the truth a bit. A young girl, sitting with her mother, who surely doesn’t understand the depths to which this event truly reaches into our culture, wouldn’t benefit from the harsh truths. Her mother is obviously going to let her keep her innocence for a while longer and offer her a simple answer such as the one we’ve seen across the news for the past week. But if people like you and I try to use that same tactic on ourselves, that’s no longer innocence but naivety.

They hate us because we’re free? Surely the televised media doesn’t consider us that gullible. I ask you, do you really believe that the United States is so innocent as a country that it’s only fault is freedom? That it is only capable of making people angry by thriving as a capitalist nation? That it’s only wrongdoing in all of its history was democracy?

Why don’t we ask Afghanistan why they hate us? Why not interview those Palestinians cheering in the streets what it is about us that makes them rejoice in our pain? Why not publish what Osama Bin Laden himself has said in regards to the United States and her crimes against humanity? I highly doubt that any one of them would say that the U.S.’s worst trait is “liberty and justice for all.”

We as a country have done some horrible things in our time. Sure, we can recap the good and charitable things we’ve done over and over again on the news to continue to instill such a great sense of nationalism in the masses, but we cannot deny our spotted past forever. Even in offering charitable help to countries in need, we deny that same help to others. Even in attempting to do the “right thing” and stick up for smaller countries, we invade on conflicts that do not directly relate to us. Even in attempting to bring peace to areas that cannot seem to find any, we become the bully that many nations will find offensive. And that’s still our good side.

Now I will never say that the U.S. deserved what it got because those who were killed and those in the most suffering are civilians, though not innocent, surely not the cause of any other country’s pain. But we as a country must not close our eyes to the true cause behind this catastrophe. We can hang our flags at half-mast, we can dedicate full hours of the news to stories of individuals lost in the tragedy, and we can even retaliate if we find it necessary, but let us not say that it was our freedom that brought such an act to come directly to our home.

Remaining naive to such an atrocity only makes the pain worse, since ignoring the problem will only insure that such an attack will surely happen again. Let’s leave the innocence to the small children watching the news, and step out of naivety, for once, with open eyes.

Alycia Smith is a sophomore English major and a columnist for The Louisville Cardinal.