(This post may seem unpopular at first, perhaps even enraging, but bear with me a second and read this through to the end, please.)
I'm sick of hearing about 9/11 every year. Yes, it has had a great impact on our way of life, all of it bad, and I don't need a reminder of how the two worst criminals in American history, George Bush and Osama bin Laden, have become unwitting partners in destroying this once-great nation.
On 9/10/01 the world was about the same as it is now: people got up and went to work, their kids went to school, and business was as usual. The economy was in the toilet thanks to the Bush economic policies that were the revival of the already-failed Keynesian supply-side economics called Reaganomics. My beloved Denver Broncos played a MNF game that night and I unfortunately saw Ed McCaffery break his leg in what would be the beginning of the end of his all-pro career.
It was a typical day.
9/11 came and we all know what happened. America went through one of its darkest hours. But we magnificently rose to the ocassion. The spirit of America came through in ways that were utterly amazing and heartening to behold, both here and elsewhere. Canadians opening their homes to strangers stranded by the air fleet grounding. Red Cross drives here that blew through fundraising goals in the first 2 hours. Americans of all religions uniting to protect peaceful American Muslims against racist lunatics so they could exercise their free religion in peace (I was witness to that!). The changing of the Royal Guard at Buckingham Palace playing the Star Spangled Bannner instead of God Save the Queen. America had the world on our side.
AND OUR LEADERS BLEW IT!
Now we hear the 9-11 mantra played all the time to justify this folly into Iraq. We hear it as a cover-all excuse to destroy our rights and our nation in the name of security, disregarding the sage words of Dr. Franklin. We give lip service to it, calling it Patriots' Day, when 9-11 had nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with the blowback of a disastrous foreign policy that had been going on for decades. The policy of interventionism came back to haunt us as it had always been predicted since George Washington's prophetic warning in his farewell address two centuries ago.
Have the perpretators of 9-11 been bought to Justice? Nope. The first WTC bombers were and they are serving life sentences for their crimes. Osama bin Laden is still at large and remains a convenient boogeyman for the Bush regime. Yet there is still the claim that they hate us for our freedoms, and those freedoms, through the efforts of the exact same people who have made that claim, have been rolled back. Yet the hate continues, not because of our freedoms, but because of our actions. Not Western decadence or not being Muslim, as some have claimed. They hate us because we've screwed around with them for too long and they are fed up with it. We responded that way once, and the result was the American Revolution. Have we strayed so far from our roots that we have forgotten what it means to be the bullied instead of the bully? It sure seems like it, and that hubris and arrogance is at the core of our problems. That's our government screwing up, not the people.
So, why do I say, "Enough on 9-11 already"? Because all it serves now is a reminder of the problems of America and how far we have to go and how little we have come in fixing them. We've lost our way. We're more concerned about Brtiney bombing the MTV awards than we are about our troops fighting for the wrong thing in a foreign land while our own borders are wide open for drugs, terrorists, and who knows what else to come on in and cause trouble. We're more concerned about a straight pin on an airplane than we are about our crumbling infrastructure.
If 9-11 is truly to be a Patriots' Day, it should be like Pearl Harbor Day or Memorial Day: a day of remembrance of the tragedy and how We the People for a brief moment came together as a nation to mourn and lift each other up, political and religious differences aside.
Instead it has been bastardized to suit political ends that are in direct conflict with the ideals of this nation, and that is unacceptable. It is for that reason alone I say, ENOUGH ALREADY!
