-Barack Obama
Where were you when the world stopped turning, on that September day, As the line from that Alan Jackson song goes?
I was in my college dorm room arguing with my ex-wife on Yahoo messenger. I couldn't even begin to tell you about what. My neighbor stopped by to bum a cigarette for the walk to class just then and when I got back to my screen my ex was freaking out and demanding that I turn the TV on. I did. It was set to CNN.
I turned on the TV just in time to see it live when the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
My neighbor, an international student from Saudi Arabia, said something in Arabic that I didn't catch.
Classes ended up being canceled that day.
I've written extensively about that time and the events surrounding it on this blog.
I'm not going to do it yet again.
I'm going to ask you;
What have we become?
Osama Bin Laden is dead. Tens of thousands of his followers and tens of thousands more of Taliban who sheltered them are dead.
For what? What good did it do?
Half of us have become a smaller hearted, smaller minded people in the intervening 20 years, people who glorify individualism without practicing it or understanding what it means, who think it's "freedom " to die of a preventable disease and who think that selfishness is the highest good, who twist Christianity into something that Osama would have very much approved of.
And the other half of us tolerated it, or fought against it until we ran out of energy and just gave up.
Some people do very much want to live in a country like Afghanistan as it was 20 years ago.
But they want to do it right here in America and find a way to get rich from it without ever leaving the couch.
And lots of the people who could or should be doing something about this have gone along with it out of fear of losing their positions or are paralyzed by indecision regarding what to do.
Conspiracy theories run rampant through our society like a tweaked out Talib who lit his long beard on fire.
Religious idiocy takes precedence over facts and reality in too many people's minds.
And hell, some people are so hopped up on the bullshit of the moment that they're trying to backdate that shit so they can make themselves seem more righteous, and for what?
Against the backdrop of this day, while other leaders like Bush, the Clintons, Obama and President Biden stood solemnly this morning at remembrance events, former President Trump and his son are commentating at a boxing match tonight and spent some time this morning saying dumb shit about aliens.
What's even the damn point anymore, Republicans?
The Taliban got smarter and won, and we didn't.
Why?
I ask this question as somebody who was a registered Republican on 9/11. Yet I was proud of how conservative people and liberal people alike came together for awhile, because we were all Americans.
Now Republicans don't want to profess to live in the same reality as the rest of us no matter how many of them die from the virus as a result.
I was going to write yesterday, I went to the bookstore instead.
My Mom and I walked the dogs in the woods this morning.
Because fuck all that.
Fuck this day.
And fuck the people who keep using it to justify their hate and selfishness and wanting for endless conflict.
On the afternoon of 9/11 I stood out behind the cafeteria at the college and I pointed out a solitary gray-green speck at the tip of a long white contrail. It was a US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker. I got my binoculars out of the car and showed my boss. Considering my background I knew what was coming.
If we don't get this hateful madness within our country under control and get a grip on ourselves it will happen again.
But it won't be Afghanistan next time, it'll be Alabama, or Texas.
And there won't be no damn good reason for it then, either.
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