The 911 Tea Party

By Park Teter


In The Adventure, a book published at TheNextCivilization.com, Park
Teter solves the puzzle of coincidences (“synchronicities”) with a new
scientific paradigm that applies in the physical world processes
borrowed from dreams. One of these processes is “projection” – just
as a projector casts images onto a movie screen, so an observer casts
facts into “reality.” Another borrowed dream process is
“overdetermination” - the use of a single image to express multiple
ideas. When a dreamer awakens from a dream world he can recognize that
he created that dream world, he was a character inside that dream
world, and he can now be an outside interpreter of that dream world.
In the same way we can experience being a creator, a character, and an
interpreter of the universe. We can interpret current events as
collective dreams.
The following text interprets 9/11. It is an excerpt from Park Teter’s
The Adventure. It was written long before the right-wing “Tea Party”
movement of today’s politics.


Terrorist acts are outward and visible signs of inward and invisible
terrors. What are the inner terrors of modern Americans?
Consider the symbols. Why should the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon be the targets of terrorists?
The giant buildings are striking expressions of America’s global
economic and military power. Nations who lack wealth and power may
resent the world’s one super-power. But it would be a great mistake to
view this resentment as mere envy.
Most Americans have little consciousness of the fact that decisions
made in New York and Washington profoundly affect the everyday lives
of billions of people all over the world. And Americans seldom reflect
that those billions of less wealthy and less powerful people have
little or no influence on the decisions made in New York and
Washington. Most Americans have no grasp of what it feels like to have
your life determined by decisions made thousands of miles away.
But what an irony that Americans, of all people, make decisions with
impacts thousands of miles away. America was founded in a revolution
against a government making decisions thousands of miles away.
Taxes imposed in America by a parliament in London triggered the
American Revolution. The American colonists demanded a right that had
long been established in their mother country: “no taxation without
representation.”
The United States government is not taxing citizens in foreign
countries. America’s impact on foreign lives is much greater than
anything that could be achieved by taxes.
In many countries the United States has supported undemocratic
regimes or overthrown democratic regimes. Here is just one example,
one that is especially relevant for understanding today’s Middle East
conflicts. In 1953 the C.I.A. overthrew Iran’s first elected
government and restored to power the dictatorial shah.
Americans simply do not know what it feels like to have a foreign
government overthrow their elected government and install a dictator.

Even more than America’s military power, America’s economic power has
decisive impacts on the lives of foreigners. Americans dominate the
multi-national corporations and international economic agencies that
profoundly influence such things as privatization, debt, taxes,
government spending, distribution of wealth, workers’ rights, health,
environment, welfare, consumer choices, media content…. And yet the
people whose way of life is being decided in New York and Washington
do not elect representatives to the U.S. Congress or executives to
giant corporations.
So what can they do?
Americans who opposed British taxation without representation dumped
taxed tea into the sea at the “Boston Tea Party.” Some Moslems who
were not represented in American decisions affecting their countries
organized the attacks of 9/11.
That was no tea party. But neither is America’s impact on the lives
of billions of unrepresented foreigners.
It is necessary to condemn terrorism, including the mass terrorism
called war. But condemning is no substitute for understanding.
Americans need to understand the impact they have on billions of
non-Americans, and then create ways to share decision-making with the
world’s majority. That is the only way that Americans can stop
betraying their own values.
To awaken themselves to their betrayal of the values on which their
country was founded is one of the reasons why Americans unconsciously
created 9/11.
[The event was overdetermined: consciously created by the terrorists
and unconsciously created by Americans.]
But there were deeper meanings.
Americans unconsciously created the attack on the center of world
trade and the attack on the center of military power to awaken them
from faith in economic power and military power.
The whole world needs to awaken from faith in economic power and
military power. That is why the whole world created the
[overdetermined] nightmare attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.
In this age of weapons of mass destruction, that awakening is urgent.
That is why the nightmare occurred on 9-11, the phone number Americans
use to cry for help.
We have better things to live for than wealth and power. For
instance, freedom and democracy. As the declaration that followed the
Boston Tea Party affirmed, “all men are created equal” and all men
have “inalienable rights.”
Inequality of wealth in America is extreme, grotesque, and growing
worse. Self-government by Americans is grossly reduced by the powerful
influence of corporate campaign financing. Free expression by
Americans is insidiously repressed by concentrated ownership of the
media.
Thus the majority of Americans, like the majority of humans, do not
have fair representation in New York and Washington.
Not everyone would agree on the contents or the priorities of a list
of betrayals of American ideals. But Americans no less than foreigners
are victims of Americans’ faith in the supremacy of economic wealth
and military power.
The nightmare of 9/11 was overdetermined. Foreign terrorists
consciously rebelled against American power. Americans unconsciously
rebelled against American power.
How can a nation rebel against its own power? It’s not easy. That is
one reason why Americans’ 9/11 rebellion against American power was
unconscious.
If Americans awaken to the message of their nightmare they will share
wealth and power with their true nation, humanity.
All humanity is crying out for rich and powerful Americans to honor
their belief that all men are created equal and are endowed with
inalienable rights. That is why all humanity created the terrible
nightmare of 9/11.