In a front page story, DarkSyde writes:
On September 11, 2001, we were no longer Republicans or Democrats, black or white, poor or wealthy. On that day we were Americans. On that day and for months after, we would have done anything our leaders asked of us.
I know this is the conventional wisdom, and I'll concede that it makes for good TV talking points to suck in the rubes. But I know I can't be the only one who gets nauseous over this kind of thing, and thinks "don't speak for me, pal".
Join me below the fold for my 9/11 experience:
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I had been up all night (as I often am). I had watched the DVD of the movie
Memento, both the normal way and in reverse (if you've seen it, you get why), and had moved on to reading reviews of the film on IMDB.com. I happened to catch wind of the events in New York and DC, and turned on the TV to watch for a couple minutes. I muttered to myself, "well, there go our civil liberties" (BTW, though I dislike the Patriot Act, things didn't go as badly on that front as I had expected). Then I went back to reading the IMDB. Maybe that makes me the world's worst, heartless, sonofabitch, but I know at least one of my friends felt similarly. Later that day, he came by and cracked, "So...this affects us here in Kirksville how, exactly?"
In any event, I was most certainly still a Democrat. I even grudgingly gave Bush credit for coming up with a good line and photo op on top of the rubble at ground zero, but only in a partisan way of "dammit, they got one up on us there". In the polls taken after 9/11, IIRC, there was something like 7 percent of the population that still disapproved of Bush--I would have been among that group, as would many of us here I suspect. And seven percent is a relatively small proportion, but it still represents nearly twenty million people, after all.
So I guess I'm just sayin': for me, it would have been a disaster had Bush pulled a "uniter, not a divider" routine after 9/11. He would have solidified GOP power for maybe a generation, and that would have been an awful thing.