On September 11, 2001 Islamic extremists attacked America and set off a series of events that confused and confounded civilized people everywhere, forcing the passive to get in touch with bloodlust in the name of self-defense and encouraging the powerful to politic the crisis to their advantage, all at the cost of an historically rare moment of global unity.
 
              The worldwide terror war, during the first year after September 11, was a civilian war.
         There were the 3000 innocents killed in America and the thousands who died before and after 9/11 during attacks in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. A body count of noncombatants killed in the war that has since been swollen by the thousands who've died in the ongoing war in Afghanistan --- either at the hands of al-Qaida and the Taliban, or by errant American or NATO bombs. A number swelled even further by the many more tens of thousands of innocents who've died so far during the second Iraq war (still in progress at this writing) and by the many more who will most assuredly die in the years to come as the conflict escalates into splintering turmoil here and there around the world and spills into our everyday lives.
 
        By the fifth anniversary of September 11 it was clear to see that for regular civilians, things would get worse before they get better. As the discontent and hopeless stir and the rich and powerful wonder why. As murderers lash out and as politicians and the media redefine right and wrong for us in this murky whole new world, watching order battle insanity live on TV.
 
        To have been alive in that year after and to have been forced by the magnitude of events to become helplessly glued to the fate of the world on TV was the average global civilian’s role in the Global War on Terror, and the story of that role should not be ignored nor forgotten.
 
    This daily journal traces that role through the account of a regular (yet often far-flung) Kansan as he muddled through that awful year, as he watched the TV turmoil along with everyone else and as he (sometimes through fate and sometimes by design) occasionally found himself face to face with it out on the streets of the whole new world in his role as a global street photographer. As people wherever he went during that year reconciled their pasts and made peace with their futures in that new world. And as many formerly-cynical Americans wrestled with their notions of the meaning of America, ultimately concluding reluctantly that despite all of it’s faults and the upsetting consequences of being involved in a smarmy all-out war --- that there was indeed no place quite like home.
                                                                                                                                                            September 11, 2006

M

White  
With Foam:

A Yearlong Journey through a damaged mind’s eye
The Confessions Of A Born-Again Cynic;

A Civilian Terror War Journal

Essays, Rumors, Field Notes, and Photographs
From the Edge of World War III

September 10, 2001 to September 12, 2002
with an epilog written at the outbreak of the invasion of Iraq,
March 19 to April 1, 2003

An American Global Street Photographer’s Independent Front-line Civilian Account of the First Year After the September 11 Attacks on America
and the First Year of the Worldwide Civilian Terror War --- From Both Sides of the 24-hour CNN TV News Screen

This journal kept in:
*Amsterdam, Netherlands; *Paris, France; *Lawrence, Kansas; *New York, New York; *Islamabad, Pakistan; *Afghanistan and *Las Vegas, Nevada

  MM

 An  
Electric Bandana/ Pack-A-Lunch-Unlimited Production.
East Village published work.

(non fiction)

This first “Artist’s Edition” published on the internet:
October 31, 2006
By East Village PhotoArts:
1717 Illinois Street, Lawrence , Kansas, 66044