Somebody has to say it, and as near as I can tell nobody is, so I guess I’ll be That Guy.
If you lost loved ones on September 11th, you have my most heartfelt condolences. All of us were damaged on September 11th, but your lives were the only ones whose were changed irreversibly. Any rememberances or memorials you want to observe, please do. You have all my respect and sympathy. That goes for all of you who have lost loved ones in the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well.
As for the rest of us… It’s time to get on with our lives. We are never going to heal if we don’t stop picking at this wound, and we’re still allowing ourselves to be played like dimestore harmonicas by an administration who has a very vested interest in keeping this pain fresh and in our minds.
It’s been two years. Yes, 9/11 was worse than the Challenger explosion. Yes, 9/11 was only moderately lower on the catastrophic scale than, say, Pearl Harbor. But unless we’re doing something that’s going to finally catch the bastards responsible, all this “never forget” stuff equals “never heal” and “never live again”.
While it’s true that we may never have lived in the safe world that we thought we had pre-9/11, and that there is value in having been exposed to The Real World that the rest of the world has to live with every day, if that’s what you’re going for, read a goddamned newspaper on any given morning. Liberia. Israel. Russia. Iraq. Afghanistan. Every day people are dying. Sometimes we’re the ones doing the killing. Getting yourselves all dolled up and preening about how your country has been so horribly, horribly wronged is downright shameful.
And as for you, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ashcroft, and Mr. Bush – by continually pulling this “if you’re not with us you’re with the terrorists” bullshit on the American people, you’re proving youselves more dangerous to us than all the terrorists on the planet combined. Get the fuck out of our White House.
And that’s all I have to say about that.