CSotD: The Lessons of the Day
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Peter Schrank’s response to the 9/11 attacks of 25 years ago became an anchor in the editorial cartooning presentation that was part of my educational mission in those days. I was doing Newspapers-in-Education for the Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY, visiting schools in the area and creating curricula to teach media literacy and current events.
Munch’s The Scream was familiar and had not yet become a cartooning cliche. Not only did Schrank do a brilliant job of substituting Wall Street for the bridge in the original, but his use of the globe showed how the entire world had responded and was behind us in our shock and grief that day.
The school year was barely a week old and I was about to debut a new educational feature in the paper. This is a later example; the one I had planned for 9/12 was about Afghanistan, where two American aide workers were jailed for Christian proselytizing and the leader of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban resistance, had just been assassinated.
We may not have been quite sure who was behind the attacks, but clearly that piece had to be discarded and a substitute quickly cobbled to replace it.
And if the al Qaeda connection was not yet confirmed, it was quickly clear who was going to be blamed, regardless of how little they may have had in common with the perpetrators.
It was also clear that we needed to reassure our kids, as horror and panic swept the nation and the world.
Our new little mascot had a job to do, and the first step was to craft a less cheerful version. That meant quickly getting in touch with Rinacat, the artist who had created her, a manga artist who lived in Malaysia, and who, like 60% of the people in that country, was Muslim, though she never wore a hijab and, if she’d ever seen a camel, it would have to have been in a zoo.
Rina came through quickly, while I began researching the full-page educational feature that would run a few days after the attacks.
The quickest way to teach the breadth and the diversity of the world’s second-largest religion was to show how many nations had a Muslim population of 10% or more. This would make it clear that not every Muslim lived in the Middle East, particularly when accompanied by a message from Nellie to give the kids a balanced perspective.
I realize this is not large enough to be readily legible, so here’s the text:
We made the feature available at no cost to other newspapers and several took advantage of the offer. You do what you can and hope for the best.
And in place of our usual sponsor message, we posted a salute to the local heroes of the crisis, who had to jump into an impossible situation at a time in the school year where they barely knew their students’ names yet. They had, however, practiced emergency responses and they did extraordinarily well to honor their profession and help their kids.
You can’t accomplish every goal, and it’s clear that the attempts to avoid a response of islamophobia were not successful. Still, you do what you can and hope it makes a difference.
We’re still got some holes that are in need of repair, but the students of 2001 are now over voting age, and when I worked the polls this week, I was impressed by the number of Gen Z’s who were registering to vote. They were barely born when the towers fell.
We’ve done what we could. The ball is now in their court.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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