If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. That’s good advice, right? That’s kind of my motto for anniversaries of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A certain degree of respect for the people we’ve lost both on that day and in the twenty years since precludes me from venting my full wrath about how this country reacted. Most of the time, I’m fuming mad about something that traces directly back to the Bush administration and their War on Truth and Terror.
The cynic in me says we deserve to have a mistaken drone attack on the front-page of the New York Times today. We don’t learn from our mistakes. But horrible mistakes are not what is ruining us. The problem is that stupidity rules the day, every day. Instead of making an itemized list, I’ll simply ask you to do this.
Imagine if you could have seen the headlines from September 11, 2020 on the evening of September 11, 2001. Imagine how much worse you would have felt.
That’s how I feel all the time. I don’t celebrate today, much less commemorate it. This is the worst day of the year, and I hate it.
I feel you. My own perspective is informed by my decision in the fall of 2000 to forgo my freshman year of college and to instead move to a kibbutz in Israel (to ostensibly grow up a bit before taking up adult responsibilities). Israel in August of 2000 was similar in cultural feel to August 2001 in the US in some crucial ways; sure there were fissions in society, but there was a neo-liberal left leaning government with peace in its rhetoric (if not its actions), and hey the economy is alright and the worlds problems were in other places. On Rosh Hashanah of 2000, just a couple weeks after the Palestinian Authority declared statehood, Ariel Sharon did his vile thing, (bob’s your uncle) and boom, buses and cars are exploding, and the farm goes into lock down.
Here I have to stress that my white, privileged 18-year-old self looked at that situation and decided, “fuck this, I’m an American and I decided to go home where we didn’t have that sort of thing happening to us. I actually did try to stick it out a bit and stayed through the election and “recount” before the bombing got too close to the farm for comfort. I watched that drama on the new fangled internet from Jerusalem the night of the election, and then read about it in the newspapers. The trauma of the Bush election was something I personally didn’t feel strongly (see, white, 18 year old male).
When the shit went down the following September, my immediate reaction boiled down to, I’ve seen this before, I thought I was past this? Every day since has been watching the boundary lines get closer and closer until there was no place to hide from the looming encroachment of crazy/evil as a repayment of the sins of the past and present, and now pretty much every trip outside feels like the thing I saw on the television on that kibbutz in Israel is at my door.
Amen.
In another 30 hours, we’ll lose another 9/11 worth of Americans to COVID-19, which could so easily have been prevented if not for the perfidy of the Republican Party. No one will notice.
Most of them are willfully unvaccinated due to Cleek’s Law—”Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily”—so it’s not really much of a loss anyway. TBH, the only reason I notice is because I read the Herman Cain Awards Reddit daily, and even then I only mourn for the kids and families these aggressive idiots leave behind.