As a veteran of the United States armed forces, I am permanently impacted by the above events.
The horror of September 11, 2001 cannot be overstated for the terror we all felt on that day. When the realization of that terror came as the second aircraft, United Airlines, Flight 175 out of Boston struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the whole nation took in the biggest collective gasp since Pearl Harbor some sixty years before.
The general results of the 9/11 Commission report was that an intelligence sharing failure between our government surveilance entities had ocurred allowing the Osama Bin Laden directed Saudi terrorists to accomplish their mission mostly unabated. With little resistance shy of the heroic acts of the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, “the enemy” had shaken the strongest nation in the world to its core. But, it also resulted in a patriotic national response from the entire population unlike anything seen since WW2.
Today we must collectively as a nation, realize and remember that the horror of the domestic terrorism attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 by a sitting president and his cult following, also cannot be overstated. Again, “the enemy” has shaken the strongest nation in the world to its core. Perhaps, a perilous change was inevitable as our two party system of governance began it’s worst decay since the Civil War when the radical administration of 2016 would eventually bring us to that fateful day. We are all too familiar with most of the details of the attack, the lives lost and a nation changed forever; the result a House of Representatives investigation and subsequent second impeachment of then President Donald J. Trump.
Unbelievably, this time the attack was successful because of a coordinated internal effort within our own upper government to intentionally underestimate the danger of the 20,000 plus election protestors deployed by our then president to interrupt the Joint Session of Congress which would eventually tally the Electoral College vote and declare Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris, respectively President and Vice President of the United States. Leaving us with the first unsuccessful peaceful tranfer of power in some 140 plus years, our nation remains incredibly divided with a proven corrupt former president and literal insurrectionists on one side and the true patriots of America on the other going into our next presidential election in 2024.
As we continue to reel from this tragedy three years later and the 91 felony charges against our former president slowly grind through the courts with every possible delay presented by his defense counsel, there rightly appears to be no remedy to the outward divisiveness. This is further aggrevated by a majority (31) of states who are legally persuing the disqualification of the former president from the US Presidential Election of 2024 via the 14th Amendment, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The GOP would obviously prefer to resolve this issue through our next election which they have been racially gerrymandering, passing election laws making it harder for minorities to vote and generally making voting more difficult for everyone for the last 3 years, while publicly declaring that they cannot win unless they cheat.
Meanwhile, as our conservative majority in the Supreme Court of the United States stands poised to make the final decisions in some of the most consequencial cases in our history with a single stroke of a pen, I am cautiously optimistic that we will patiently resolve to plan, organize and influence the greatest participation and turnout in US elections history to finally rid our nation of this malignity. That MUST BE our collective resolution for the year 2024.