Stop Hatin' On Donnie Darko's Sister Already!

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has been getting a lot of hate from some of her fellow Americans over comments she made about the U.S. government’s role in the events of 9/11. Much of this hate has come from misguided readers, who for some reason or another (I blame the public school system), took her comments to mean that the U.S. deserved the attacks because of its questionable foreign policy over the last 50 years.

First of all, to anyone with an 8th grade education, Maggie’s comments are definitely not a sanction of what happened on 9/11. At no point does she ever say “we deserved this.” All she says is that the attacks didn’t come from nowhere…there’s some reason people are pissed at the U.S. enough to plan an attack, and as citizens, we should try and find out these reasons, so we can prevent similar events from occurring in the future.

A friend of mine recently summed up the protesters’ position for me as “What happened on 9/11 was so horrendous that we shouldn’t even be asking if the Government’s foreign policy could have contributed to it because there’s just no way to justify what those terrorists did.”

The problem here is one of semantics. Discerning whether something contributed to an event is wholly different from trying to justify what happened. There are lots of events in history that are unjustifiable, but we can still look back and see all the different elements that led up to them.

Perhaps the following allegory will help better explain Maggie’s position*:

Imagine coming home from school one day to find that all of your siblings have been brutally murdered. Naturally, you are shocked to find that the murderer is some woman who lives across town, and as far as you can tell, has no connection to you or anyone you know.
Later on however, you discover that your mother not only had an affair with the woman’s husband, but had also stolen a job from her a year earlier. Granted, murdering innocent children is hardly fair payback for having her husband and job stolen; it’s really unjustified. But now you’ve come to realize that your mom in some way contributed to what happened. It’s not that she’s a bad mom. She would never have expected any harm to come to her kids,…and you still love her and everything, but in the future, you might want to pay closer attention to how and with whom she conducts her relationships.


Being aware and sometimes critical of your Government’s foreign policy does not make you less patriotic. If anything, it makes you a more informed citizen. It’s important to believe in your country’s role in the world, but it’s equally important to understand how the rest of the world interprets that role. Whether you like it or not, how the world sees us will shape the events in our future.
In the end, isn’t it always the children that pay?