I don't know anyone who lost a family member, friend, enemy, pet, etc. on 9/11. According to the media, most of the 300+ million people in this country lost someone. Umm sorry, but that's just not the case. A very tiny fraction of people were directly affected by this event, and for them the mantra "we will never forget" may actually be a curse compliments of our bullshit media and it's inability to EVER say there's a 2-ton elephant in the room and it's sitting squarely on our country. Time is a healer, but what if every time you picked up a paper, turned on the news, or scanned the bookshelves at the local retailer and were reminded over, and over, and over again that this nation is on a unbridled quest to avenge your loss, how would you feel years later? What if you had forgiven and moved on with your life, yet the war on terror precipitated by that day continued at a tremendous cost to the vast majority of U.S. citizens that lost nothing. Would this bother you?
Let's see what that cost looks like over the last 10 years. More servicemen and women killed than the total number of people who died in the twin towers, the pentagon and Flight 193. Tens of thousands more horribly injured by powerful explosives, people that would have died decades ago but are now permanently disabled and disfigured, and a long-term financial drain on this country. A trillion dollars evaporated - all deficit spending. Laws of compassion ignored to torture people, often times innocent people. And, in my mind, the biggest cost of all - the cost of a decade of war on people's psyche. Do you remember what it was like when this country wasn't shipping young people off to die? When we thought our country, despite some warts, was basically a good country with noble laws and a decent level of respect in the world order. That's gone now, dredged through the muck of these stupid, useless wars that continue to suck us deeper into the black hole of vengeance at any cost. It's sickening, and you know who is paying the highest price? Minorities. A dis-proportionate number of those killed and maimed in these wars are minorities, and a large number of those minorities are Hispanic. Yeah, those brown-skinned people conservative nativists are trying like hell to clean out of our cities and states cause, you know, they smell funny or look different and don't always use English to communicate. These minorities can't get good paying jobs in this country so they join the military and have room and board, medical, dental, retirement and some free schooling. I wonder how many members of congress over the last 10 years had children in either Iraq or Afghanistan? I can tell you it's close to ZERO. Joe Biden had a son or two, but he's not a war hawk and I've never heard him boasting about it.
So, our cowardly media reports on all those feel good stories about 9/11. On television, commentators are asking sports stars where they were that fateful morning, like anyone actually gives a fuck what some jock was doing 10 years ago. And the newspapers, with one story after another of how patriotic we all were back then, how this country came together to hear it's commander and chief tell every red-blooded American to go out and buy shit to make things better. Yeah, that's right, Bush the idiot told everyone to go shopping. Instead of a call to sacrifice, to REALLY do something to fuck with the terrorists like weaning ourselves from too much imported oil, we were told to spend dough. Leave this terrorists fighting thing up to us, we know how to handle them evil doers. Well, we know how that turned out. I believe history will record that response as the worst display of leadership in the history of this country - no close second.
So here we are, 10 years later, stuck in two never-ending, unwinnable wars; suffering intractable unemployment from an economy that may be once again on the brink of collapse; buried in debt beyond belief; witnessing first hand the affects of climate change and the resulting deadly weather; experiencing a wealth-gap that erodes away at our disappearing middle-class and stuck with some of the dumbest, bat-shit crazy politicians in recent history to fix it all. And, of course, our wounded psyche. Again, this part scares me more than any other. Hope is in critically short supply, yet how can we hope for a better tomorrow when nothing ever fucking changes. Obama's message of hope is a pathetic failure because nothing changed. Same old tired, bullshit politics. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We need to be out of the middle east now. Cut our losses and scram. We need tariff protections put in place to save jobs. We need to legalize marijuana then tax it to bring the drug cartels to their knees. We need a tax overhaul, especially for business, that is simple and we need it now to end the uncertainty over the future so companies will start spending the trillion plus they have stashed away and hire workers again. And we need a leader who communicates with us. I've written about it before on this blog and I'll say it again. Communicate Obama!!!! Fuck speeches to Congress. Speak to us, with visual aids like a power-point, or charts and graphs, or anything - and be truthful. We can take the truth. We need our collective psyche healed, and it's not going to happen with a media that will never call out lying politicians but instead wants to feed us a steady diet of reality television to somehow make our own reality less pitiful. We need a leader to guide us out of the last, lost decade and into a tomorrow where we sacrifice, all of us, for the greater good. We will never survive another decade like the last one - never.
