So a few hundred people huddled around the plasma screen watching,
crying, whimpering a bit, calling family, I started to think about
what this meant for the country. Everyone's going to get over their
sorrow and be really angry. People died, someone had to pay.
What I realize now is that we've all paid a heavy price.
It's worse because it's a self-imposed price.
7 years and an hour or so ago, I was walking to someone's office at
work. I worked at Pharmacia (now Pfizer, previously Monsanto,
previously Searle) out in Skokie (now an empty building). I walked
through a brand new atrium / internal mall structure that they
constructed during renovation. It had a ~60ft plasma wall mounted
screen and was showing CNN.
I walked into an office, and the research scientist had the radio on
and was sitting, listening. She didn't really say anything to me, just
kind of looked at me, looked back at the radio and sat down. I
listened, and heard that a plane crashed into a tower at the WTC. I
fast-walked outside and looked at the plasma from the second floor,
and right there I saw, live, the second plane crash into the tower.
Then the towers fell, and cameramen all over the city were being
overtaken by a surely toxic combination of building material,
insulation, office, and yes... as I thought of at the time, people.
So a few hundred people huddled around the plasma screen watching,
crying, whimpering a bit, calling family, I started to think about
what this meant for the country. Everyone's going to get over their
sorrow and be really angry. People died, someone had to pay.
What I realize now is that we've all paid a heavy price.
We lost over three thousand people from different parts of the world
that day, and thanks to the failed leadership of Christine Todd
Whitman, we lost and have been losing firefighters, police officers,
emergency responders, and regular people that went to help pull people
out of the rubble.
We lost billions of dollars in lost revenue, real estate, and people's
lives, but we've lost billions more and set our country's progress in
defeating poverty, improving education, and providing health care
because we (and I stress, this is a we, since majority of the country
at the time went along) decided to go to war with Iraq.
We lost the American brand, our international goodwill, our definition
of our culture to the rest of the world and to ourselves because our
President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Attorney General,
Deputy Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor
systematically decided that torture was acceptable as long as we used
the words "enhanced interrogation techniques".
We lost our diplomatic currency in the world because our government
chose not to talk to those it disagreed with, and to threaten those
who opposed our interests.
We lost our free press because Republicans at all levels of
government, being in control of the government at the federal level,
decided anyone that disagreed with how they run government was
unpatriotic, and launched a comprehensive propaganda campaign to
deceive the American Population. The Bush administration continued a
campaign created by Reagan to continue co-opting the media and
improved on it, sent out "talking points" and made sure everyone kept
"on message", even when confronting direct questioning with absolute
facts backing them.
We've lost good men and women in our military because we decided that
invading countries was easy, and didn't require sacrifice. The
administration told us we didn't need more than 200,000 troops to
occupy Iraq. We were told we'd be welcomed as liberators, and that oil
revenues would pay the entire bill of the war. They told us Iraq was
pursuing nuclear weapons and intended to use them on us. When they
invaded, they didn't plan the invasion past taking Baghdad. They
didn't plan on what to do with the Iraqi Army and disbanded it. They
didn't secure vital power, water, and sewage facilities, they secured
oil derricks. They allowed rioting and looting to take place because
they thought "it would work itself out". They didn't rebuild the
country, and we should have seen that coming because George W. Bush
stated in a 2000 presidential debate, "I don't think our troops ought
to be used for what's called nation-building". There was no real plan
on what to do short of taking out Saddam Hussein, and our troops have
paid the price, being picked off one by one by insurgents that we
did learned the lessons from Vietnam to prepare for, but chose not
to.
Worst of all, we lost our own people. There are still people that
supported and support the reasons we went to war, still people that
soak up talking points and spit them out as real thought and opinion,
people who aren't honest with themselves or with others about what the
responsibilities of government are.
People who have never attempted to resolve their faith with their own
rights in the world. People who have never prioritized the good and
rights of the many over the rights of themselves. People who believe
they can restrict what other people can do with their bodies, but
scream bloody murder if they're told they can't force religion into
our schools through "intelligent design" or school prayer, or into our
courts with the Ten Commandments.
People who can not and will never be talked down. You can't debate or
argue with people that will never agree on a set of facts if it
doesn't fit their world view, because of facts don't line up, the
facts must be wrong.
We've lost segments of our population that people are no longer
comfortable with. Towelheads, Hajjis, terrorists, secret muslims are
what we call them. We can't trust our own citizens. We discriminate
consciously and unconsciously.
In my opinion (as everything here is), September 11th's terrorist
attacks didn't cause this to happen. But it showed how ugly we as a
people respond to threats, respond to hardship, and how easily we as a
people are manipulated, and how the easily the normal voices of calm
intelligent response can be silenced.
Through the leaders we voted for and through our inability to stand up
for what we believe in, we signed away our rights, our civil
liberties, our rule of law, and left a path of destruction through our
country and many others that will take decades to repair.
Our government has done terrible,
horrible things in the past, and is doing them now.
I wish I could say I'd done something more than vote and speak out to stop it, but then I remember if everyone spoke out, spoke their minds, did the bare minimum of their civic duty, we wouldn't have fallen this far.
I hereby take my share of responsibility for the aftermath of September 11th. I didn't fight, I didn't participate in civil disobedience, I didn't pursue obvious lies and expose them to everyone I knew. I sat back, watched, shook my head, spoke out, but did little else.
I know now that just isn't good enough.