Precarious Life

While reading Precarious Life, I was struck by the way in which the author described the attacks on September 11. There was a national feeling of terror after September 11, and people no longer felt safe in the United States. After the attacks, many Americans saw all Muslims as terrorists. Because of the acts of individuals, an entire culture and all people of Middle Eastern origin were targeted and labeled as "evil" people who would stop at nothing to end the spread of Western Civilization. A good thing for everyone to remember is that not all Muslims or all Middle Eastern people have the same way of thinking as those who committed the attacks during September 11 or other acts of violence. And even these people were conditioned to act this way.
"Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or 'evil.'" (Butler, 15). It is true that all individuals who commit acts of violence should be held accountable for their acts, and there is no reason other than acting of their own accord that people finally choose to commit these acts. Before people start to make their own decisions about other cultures based on the actions of individuals who have taken their beliefs to the extremes of fundamentalists. People who commit acts of violence such as those that occured on September 11 have their own way of thinking about things. It is not neccessarily the same thinking as everyone who is a part of that religion or culture. It is almost similar to the whistleblower discussion. The whistleblower believes that everyone holds the same ideals as he or she does. When the whistleblower finds out that this way of thinking is not true, the whistleblower's ideal of the organization is destroyed. The whistleblower makes the mistake of thinking that everyone in his or her organization is thinking the same way, but in reality they aren't. That is how my dad felt about the company he worked for when the ideals he upheld were not upheld by the rest of the company. It is dangerous for people to believe that everyone from an organization or culture is of the same way of thinking as the people with the highest ideals or the most fundamentalist view. When people think this way, it causes animosity towards an entire group of people because of the views of individuals. People need to realize that not everyone in any one area think the same way. The author does a great job of describing the way that people take things the wrong way and mass paranoia errupts. People are easily manipulated by situations, and need to stick to their own ways of thinking and realize that everyone has their own thought process as well.