Before I get people all riled up, I just want to say to anyone who was a survivor or family member of the victims of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, I am truly sorry and saddened by your loss on that fateful day, and I hope you have come to some terms over this tragedy, especially since the main perpetrator of those crimes has met his fatal end. And while I was deeply affected like nearly all Americans immediately after that September day ten years ago, I am tired of the crass and jingoistic way the anniversary has been pushed upon us by the media and our politicians.
When those hijackers flew those jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that day, I, like most Americans, was stricken with terror and grief, not fully comprehending at the time why anyone would want to attack us on our own soil. Like most Americans, we rallied together to do whatever we could to put aside our differences and bring our country together to get through this horrible tragedy. And for a brief moment, the entire world was rallying to help us. But instead of using this tragedy to make changes that would bring all Americans together, the previous administration exploited this tragedy to get us into two wars, one of which was completely unnecessary, and to pass draconian laws which infringed on the Constitutional right of privacy for all Americans, not to mention cast an entire group of religious followers into suspicion. For the next seven years, anyone who criticized this brazen overreach into futile domestic or foreign policy was branded as unpatriotic at best and accused of assisting terrorists at worst. Meanwhile, we were subjected to a terror alert code which was geared more to politically motivated policies than actual terrorist threats, and we were given the ridiculous suggestion to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to protect us from biological attack. Not long after that domestic debacle, we launched an offensive war against a dictator who had nothing to do with those terrorists who attacked us, and we lost several thousand men and women in the process, seriously wounded tens of thousands more, and killed at least a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens, not to mention blew a budget surplus and wasted more money than at any time in our nation's history and destroyed much of the goodwill towards other nations. And what do we have to show for it?
We have a broken economy, we have relations with Arab and Muslim countries which are only now recovering from their lowest point ever, and we have a bunch of yahoos in the Republican party who are willing to exploit the tragedy of 9/11 and the two wars which followed to pay lip service to our military men and women in public while systemically trying to gut their benefits behind the scenes.
And the media has been just as craven in exploiting this tragedy. For the past month, Most of the major TV networks and nearly all the news networks have been trumpeting up their latest specials with regard to 9/11, yet offer little if any context on how this event has fractured our country and how the reaction to it has pervaded the national discourse. Even more maddening to me is the fact that, in the most economically challenging time in our lifetimes, when people are screaming for jobs, the news media is focusing on the spectacle of a tragedy which happened ten years ago while ignoring the tragedy currently unfolding before our very eyes today.
It was a little over a month ago that the GOP radicals in Congress held our country and the global economy hostage over the debt ceiling debacle, and a few GOP wackos, one of which is currently running for President, had the gall to tell the President that the debt ceiling didn't need to be raised, yet insisted that we find the money to pay for our troops, not realizing that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would cause all government functions to come to a screeching halt. Yet this ridiculous line of questioning was parroted all over Fox News and right wing radio.
And another thing that irks me has been the way Major League Baseball and the NFL have used this tragedy to turn otherwise entertaining sports events into jingoistic faux-patriotic get-togethers. During playoff games, instead of singing "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch, we have been subjected to renditions of "God Bless America". While I don't have any qualms against that anthem itself, why can't they leave that to pre-game ceremonies? And when the national anthem is sung before NFL games, do we really need Navy and Air Force fighter planes flying by every time?
Now to some people, I will sound exactly like that "America hating, terrorist coddling traitor" the GOP loves to rail against, but I just want to be able to love my country without having to be force fed about it. Personally, I reflected a lot about the 9/11 attacks and their victims after the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death by President Obama. I thought that was the most appropriate time to look back at what happened to us as a country, pray for the victims' families and survivors in that they found some peace in the final justice of that moment, and consider where we have been as a nation and how to move forward. If anything, I just want people to know they can still love their country yet not have to mindlessly follow what others tell you to do.