5 Years and a Day

Today is the day after the 5th anniversary of Sept. 11th, and it just so happens to be the primary elections for Minnesota. I can't think of a better way to commemorate the event then by exercising my right to vote. I hope you all join me.

At what point will this date just become another day? At what point will the wounds be at least scabbed over or enough of us be dead for it to be a dim memory, like Pearl Harbor Day is now? It's hard to imagine that will ever be the case, but in some strange way the certainty that it will provides some small measure of comfort. Not that we will forget the lessons learned on that day or in the aftermath, but that in some way the pain will lessen and we'll be able to examine it from the outside. I hope to live to see that day, so that I can see the men and women who have used September 11th as a buzz word and a campaign slogan villified as they should be.

We all have our "where were you on 9/11 stories", and there isn't much point in rehashing mine. I do remember that just a few months earlier I was lamenting to my father that my generation had no unifying event like Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement to identify us coheasively and take us out of our little navel-gazing Paris-hilton obsessing bullshit. I didn't mean this, however. This was not what I signed on for. None of us signed on for the 3000 men and women dead that day, the additional 3000 American soldiers dead unnecessarily in Iraq, or the literally countless numbers of dead civilians we've been racking up like points in a video game in Afghanistan and Iraq. I sure as hell didn't sign on for the most partisan and duplicitous government since Nixon's. I didn't sign up to see Toby Keith use the American flag as a backdrop for racism and hatred, or the American government detain and torture people without due process of law, or our civil liberties chopped up into bits and served back to us as "Freedom Fries". I didn't sign on for the diversionary tactic that is the Iraq War, for the killing of innocent civilians who had nothing at all to do with the fight that was actually brought to our door. I didn't sign on to see the nation I love turn the clock back to the era of McCarthy and in a perverse twist, define patriotism like the communists did back in the day: blind obedience.

I could blame the government, but the people get the government that they derserve (vote!). Sure the government has a share in the blame; Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, they whole sinister lot of them are evil to the core of their shriveled black beings, but ultimately we are the collective idiots that put them in power, either by ambivalence, actually voting for them, or not getting the truth out there. I don't want to believe that my countrymen would willingly put these jackals in power if they knew the truth. I may not know the full truth, but I do know that you don't throw good money after bad, and you don't throw American dead bodies on top of other American dead bodies. The President keeps saying we are safer..... how can we be safer when we are at a two-front foriegn war, an internal domestic war for all intents and purposes, and 3000 people who weren't dead three years ago are now very much not alive? We cannot be safer when no other country has our back (and no, Georgie-Boy, Poland does not fucking count); we as a country took the collective goodwill of the nations of the world and literally pissed all over it in attempt to define ourselves as the "don't-fuck-with-me" nation of the New Millenium. We are at present the national equivalent of a steroid junky- so big we are beginning to destroy ourselves from the inside while simultaneously ramping up the hysterical aggression. That sort of behavior is why pitbulls get put down, and eventually we will too. In our quest to fight "terror", we have become terrorists ourselves. Or doesn't it count when the death toll is made of foreign civilians and our own national values?

I don't have any pearls of wisdom with which to end this rant. In the face of tragedy, disappointment, and outrage I think human beings have a need to fill in the gap with meaning and eloquence. In the case of September 11th we should resist that urge. Sometimes the dead shouldn't be covered up with flowers and poetry. Sometimes atrocities should be left as gaping wounds, much like the hole in the ground still left where the World Trade Center once stood. At a certain point you can no longer bury the dead. You have to face them. I can only hope that soon our nation will be ready to stop running from ourselves and hiding behind the guise of "the war on terror", and face the uncertain, but honest, future.