Five Years Later....
A Quick Introductory Note:I have written this post for myself because I want most of all for my journal to be just that: a journal that I can look upon in a few--or many--years time. I am leaving it unlocked, however, because I think [hope?] that discussing and thinking about these things will help us in the end, whether in the practical sense of inspiring policy change or in the emotional sense of understanding what happened five years ago and how we were all changed that day.
I know a lot of you are sharing your thoughts online. I have read them all, even if I did not comment. My own thoughts and views follow. Because I know that some would rather not read political opinions associated with 9/11, I have divided the post into two parts. If you want to read my personal story, you will know that the topic is going to change by my usual line break "~oOo~".
Likewise, if you prefer me ranting on a soapbox to squicky personal posts [because this is a very personal story and not a time in my life that I like to talk about] then you are, of course, welcome to amuse yourself with my usual pissing and moaning, keeping mind that these are, of course, my opinions, and as my father-in-law is fond of saying: "Opinions are like ass****s; everyone's got one, and sometimes, they stink."
~oOo~
Today is the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I know that I am not alone in saying that I will always remember that day: where I was, what I was doing, how I felt. I often hear people say how they can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the attacks.
I will always remember 9/11 as perhaps the turning point at a time in my personal life when I was behaving in quite a foolish manner. Bobby and I had broken up some months before. It was my fault; I don't pretend otherwise. I was seeing someone else on the 11th of September in 2001, and it was--to be mild about it--not working out.
I was shutting out the world. I felt like I had no family or friends that I could talk to because they all hated me for leaving Bobby and behaving so stupidly. I remember that I drove to school that day with a CD playing in my car because I needed to lose myself in music. I didn't want to hear the radio, the interruption of human voices. Just music. It was one of the few ways that I could stop thinking about how fucked up my life was.
I cried on my way to school that day for a reason completely unrelated to the terrorist attacks that were going on even as I drove down the highway, feeling very sorry for myself, on my way to UMBC.
I had my psychometrics class that day. Perhaps it is a testament to the kind of school UMBC was (and probably still is) and the sorts of students that go there that it was a ten o'clock class, both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and a plane into the Pentagon, and no one thought to mention it. No one was absent from class. Our TA taught like nothing was wrong. I heard two students behind me make a casual remark about "a plane crashing into a tower," but I assumed that it was some local accident, a small aircraft into a radio tower, maybe.
When I got out of psychometrics class at 10:50, I went to The Pub for an orange soda. I stepped onto the quad, and students everywhere were on cell phones. There was a line at the pay phone.
Weird, I thought and moved on.
In The Pub, someone had set up a TV in the corner, which was also odd. UMBC students don't watch TV at school unless they're watching a chess game on the closed-circuit TVs in The Commons. There was a crowd around the TV. I went and bought my orange soda and meandered over to the crowd. It was around 11 a.m. at this point. I had no clue what was going on.
What I saw on the TV...it couldn't be real. I walked away.
I walked a slow circle around campus, drinking my orange soda, and I thought about what I had seen. For perhaps the first time in weeks, I thought about someone other than my asshole boyfriend and my own pathetic self. But I still didn't believe that what I had seen could be real.
Or maybe I didn't want it to be real.
I had no cell phone to call home (not that it probably would have worked anyway), and I was afraid to stop someone and ask. How does one ask a question like that? "Excuse me, how are you? Fine, thanks. Yes, I wanted to ask: Did I just see the World Trade Center collapse into rubble?" And what would they answer? "Yup, you saw correctly. Have a nice day!"
So I wandered back to The Pub and stood with the other students for a while, watching the TV. In a big crowd when you can't hear the sound and you don't know what's going on, the images from that day don't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps because you can't believe that what you see is real. Or you don't want to believe that it is real. I stood for a while and finished my orange soda. I had more classes that day, but I went to my car. If what I'd seen had been true, then I didn't belong in school. And I wanted to put on the radio to see if that would tell me what was going on.
It did. All of the radio stations had been taken over by special broadcasts. I believe it was Dan Rather who said, "For those of you just joining us..." and I started to sob then because I knew that it was true. And I cried the way home, just as I'd cried on the way to school, but it was for a different reason this time.
The day of 9/11/01 was such a beautiful day. I don't think that those who didn't live through it will ever understand what a beautiful day it was. The sky was clear and the sun was shining. The birds sang. It was warm and, for once, not humid. It seemed impossible for such awful events to happen on such a beautiful day.
My dad was at the cardiologist's office, running on a treadmill for a stress test when the planes hit. He'd had a quintuple bypass the summer before.
Bobby, I would come to find out, was on his way to--ironically--a class called International Terrorism when he got word of the attacks. Bobby's history of studying terrorism is an interesting one. Because of him, I knew the names Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda before they were in the headlines. We used to go on hikes and talk about our respective studies. I talked about psychology and he talked about political science, namely how the US was ignoring the threat of terrorism, how we would one day be victims of our own ignorance. Especially, he said, Islamic fundamentalists like Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda.
When he took International Terrorism that year, it was not a popular class. In subsequent years, it filled up almost as soon as it opened. But that year, terrorism was "their" problem, not our own. The big political discussion then was the 2000 electile dysfunction between Al Gore and George W. Bush and all the subsequent Supreme Court snafu.
So folks, if you still naively believe that we were caught by surprise that day, guess again. The experts--and by this, I mean people who study political science and intelligence, not friends-of-friends who end up heading intelligence agencies--were screaming their dear little heads off about the threat of radical fundamentalist groups like Al-Quaeda. But of course, no one listened. Perhaps we didn't want to listen. Heck, Bobby was an undergraduate and talking about it. But even in undergraduate circles, no one listened. His study of terrorism in the time before 9/11 was considered a bit odd and certainly impractical.
Until, of course, it happened.
Bobby has always been my barometer when it comes to world events. I will admit naivete to most world news. It literally makes me sick to read that kind of stuff on a regular basis, especially since I don't trust the media enough to believe them on matters pertaining to Hollywood gossip much less international relations. So I don't follow the news. I always asked Bobby to explain things to me and make sense of them.
Never before, though, had I needed sense made of something like I did on 9/11. And Bobby, of course, wasn't there because of stupid, stupid me.
The man I was seeing at the time didn't want to talk about it. I suppose that in his highly dramatic personal life--in which I'd become so foolishly ensnared--the deaths of nearly 3,000 didn't matter nearly so much. And so I spoke to no one about it and cried about it nearly every day for many months.
I remember that my significant other at the time asked me once if I ever missed Bobby. I told him that I missed most talking to Bobby, because the best thing between the two of us--whether friends or lovers or husband and wife--has been that we can talk to each other and untangle nearly anything. I desperately needed him to untangle this for me. I wanted to understand why and how something like that came to happen. I wanted to cry to him without feeling foolish, like I did when I admitted how much 9/11 hurt to my significant other at the time.
My significant other became angry with my answer. "You can talk to me," he said. "I'm intelligent too; I can talk with you about anything that Bobby would!" But even as he said that, I knew that we could not. Bobby will listen to me blather. He listens to me blather about Elves and writing all of the time now. He makes me feel like what I have to say is important, even when--really--it's not. And he does have a wonderful knack for untangling things for me. He knows that I am intelligent, yes, but also high-strung and apt to see certain things in terms of emotion rather than logic. He also knows how averse I am to the news and the media in general. He is patient when I rant and tender in telling me when I am wrong. Carlos--my significant other at the time--was none of those things, is far too self-centered to ever be any of those things.
Bobby and I still worked together at The Piece; we even went to the national sundae-making competition together and won the award for Best Teamwork despite the fact that we didn't speak aside from shouting, "Hot fudge!" and "Hand me a banana knife!" at each other. My mom worked there too at the time and wrote the schedule, and she'd been careful to give us opposite shifts for many months. But perhaps in her motherly wisdom, that slowly began to change. Bobby and I began to work together more and more, often the only two cooks in the kitchen. Slowly, we began to speak again. We spoke of politics and world events. He made sense of things to me, even though I dared not admit to him how emotionally frail I was, over my personal life and hurting over 9/11 still.
In November, Carlos and I broke up. I finally did the right thing, gave him an ultimatum (knowing even as I did that he wouldn't take it), and stuck to my resolution. I've never spoken to him since. Suddenly, it was much easier to talk to Bobby. We began to see each other outside of work. He took me to Chili's one night after The Piece closed for a late dinner, and we finally talked about 9/11. About everything. I cried, I remember that, and was glad that we were the only ones left in the restaurant. He held my hand, I remember that too. He told me that he wished he'd known that I'd never talked to anyone about it, but what can I say? I am stubborn and stoic. I don't like to admit that I am hurting, even to the people I love the most.
It is strange, how the two became entwined: the worst time of my life and perhaps the darkest day in modern American history. How one solved the other and the other began to--if not solve--at least make sense of the first. At least for me. How somewhere in there, I healed.
So I join the legions who will always remember exactly what they were doing and felt at the moment that they heard the news. For me, I was full of self-pity, and that ended that day. Things began to change, if slowly.
And I don't want to forget that day. I'm afraid that some have, but I don't want to. I will cry over it, every year and quite a bit in between too. The wound will never heal. But I don't want it to.
~oOo~
The question to ask now: Have we learned anything from all of this??
Sadly, my belief is "no."
Bobby's honor's thesis was of course on terrorism: more specifically, how to fight terrorism and whether we are doing a good job of it.
The "War on Terror" it is called. But is it even a war? According to the current administration, it is. Through a dodgy system of reasoning that has eluded me for many years now, we are at war in Iraq because of terrorism. Or that's what we were told.
But how does one fight terrorism? Can it be done with tanks and planes and armies, like we've fought wars before? A terrorist cell was discovered right here in my hometown of Baltimore. What good are tanks and planes and armies in eliminating a terrorist cell in an American city? Or--more importantly--discovering it in the first place?
As we pour our resources into buying more tanks and planes and armies, first responders (police, firefighters, and emergency medical services) see their funding routinely cut and have trouble getting the equipment that they need to respond in a national emergency. What intelligence operations we do have spend more time chasing their tails than getting anything done. Homeland Security spends more time covering their asses in the instance of another attack than they do actually trying to prevent another attack. Can anyone explain to me how we can spend millions of dollars on a "terror alert system" that learning theory shows will not cause any favorable change in human behavior, yet funding is cut for first responders? Or intelligence operations continue to get tiny budgets as compared to the military and customs officers are filling up their service vehicles out of their own pockets? We can spend billions on missile systems and aircraft carriers, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on a hiring freeze?
And we have not forgotten 9/11?
I think that we have. Or at least, we have allowed an administration to come into power that has.
I was at the ice rink the other night when Katie Couric was interviewing Bush II about whether we are safer five years later than we were on 9/11. If "safer" can be defined by our increased suspicion of brown-skinned people, then yes, I suppose we are. If "safer" is defined by having enough intelligence and local law enforcement to hopefully discover the next attack before it happens and enough first responders to assist if it does, then no, I don't think that we are any safer. When I look at what goes on between Bobby's workplace and mine, I really don't trust those in power to care about their own careers and good names to make wise decisions for the safety of this country. The low men and women on the totem pole are the ones who care and do their work (versus kissing ass), so they will never make it to a place where their voices actually matter.
In the meantime, we've seen 9/11 used as an excuse for racism--up to and including murder--such that an Indian man who sold jewelry in the mall where I worked at The Piece had to put up a sign saying, "I am an American citizen of Indian descent" in order not to lose business and be harassed by people who thought that he was Middle Eastern because he had dark skin and wore a turban. As though he should even have to make this excuse in order to be treated like every other American citizen, even if he was Middle Eastern.
We've seen 9/11 used as an excuse to trample civil rights, Constitutional rights, and sometimes human rights too, especially in our dealings overseas. And it has become acceptable--sometimes even popular!--to use 9/11 to justify this too. After the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, a good percentage of Americans said that we acted acceptably because we were only doing to them what they do to us. And people honestly thought that this kind of thinking was okay.
A circle of violence, anyone? This is why I am a pacifist. Someone has to have the courage to stop it.
What we have not used 9/11 as an excuse to do is to take measures so that it does not happen again. Bill Maher once brought up an interesting point: After 9/11, we all went on about how much we love our first responders. Heartwarming commercials about how much we love and appreciate police and firefighters filled the air. We gave them standing ovations in parades and NYPD and NYFD hats and clothing became immensely popular. Yet when it came time to spend a little of the surplus, where did the money go? Toward raising the dismal salaries of those who devote--and sometimes give--their lives in order to protect us? Those who climbed the stairs of a burning building doused in jet fuel in order to save even one life? Or maybe we'd give our first responders a tax cut?
Or maybe we'd give the rich a tax cut and our first responders a pat on the back and a show of solidarity by wearing an NYPD hat and listing Third Watch as our favorite television show?
As far as intelligence goes, the Department of Homeland Security was once called "a bunch of old generals sitting around a telling war stories" for a reason. Because, naturally, with a war-mongering administration like ours, homeland security belongs in the hands of old military generals, not in the hands of law enforcement or intelligence agents who might have actually done something novel like studying terrorism. And what has DHS done aside from making TSA akin to the Post Office in terms of imbecility and inefficiency? And managing to botch the worst disaster on American soil since 9/11--that would be Hurricane Katrina, for those of you living in cardboard boxes--even when they had days worth of warning? And we expect them to be able to respond with a moment's notice? (Or even seven minute's notice, if they're busy reading My Pet Goat with first-graders?)
Slapping a magnetic sticker on the car isn't remembering 9/11. Nor is it remembered by electing an administration that would rather promote racism than cease our dependence on foreign oil (because brown-skinned people don't give campaign contributions but the oil lobby sure does), an administration that thinks that removing a dictator from Iraq while the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks runs free--and unlooked for--in the mountains of Afghanistan is okay.
Let's remember 9/11.
I know a lot of you are sharing your thoughts online. I have read them all, even if I did not comment. My own thoughts and views follow. Because I know that some would rather not read political opinions associated with 9/11, I have divided the post into two parts. If you want to read my personal story, you will know that the topic is going to change by my usual line break "~oOo~".
Likewise, if you prefer me ranting on a soapbox to squicky personal posts [because this is a very personal story and not a time in my life that I like to talk about] then you are, of course, welcome to amuse yourself with my usual pissing and moaning, keeping mind that these are, of course, my opinions, and as my father-in-law is fond of saying: "Opinions are like ass****s; everyone's got one, and sometimes, they stink."
~oOo~
Today is the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I know that I am not alone in saying that I will always remember that day: where I was, what I was doing, how I felt. I often hear people say how they can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the attacks.
I will always remember 9/11 as perhaps the turning point at a time in my personal life when I was behaving in quite a foolish manner. Bobby and I had broken up some months before. It was my fault; I don't pretend otherwise. I was seeing someone else on the 11th of September in 2001, and it was--to be mild about it--not working out.
I was shutting out the world. I felt like I had no family or friends that I could talk to because they all hated me for leaving Bobby and behaving so stupidly. I remember that I drove to school that day with a CD playing in my car because I needed to lose myself in music. I didn't want to hear the radio, the interruption of human voices. Just music. It was one of the few ways that I could stop thinking about how fucked up my life was.
I cried on my way to school that day for a reason completely unrelated to the terrorist attacks that were going on even as I drove down the highway, feeling very sorry for myself, on my way to UMBC.
I had my psychometrics class that day. Perhaps it is a testament to the kind of school UMBC was (and probably still is) and the sorts of students that go there that it was a ten o'clock class, both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and a plane into the Pentagon, and no one thought to mention it. No one was absent from class. Our TA taught like nothing was wrong. I heard two students behind me make a casual remark about "a plane crashing into a tower," but I assumed that it was some local accident, a small aircraft into a radio tower, maybe.
When I got out of psychometrics class at 10:50, I went to The Pub for an orange soda. I stepped onto the quad, and students everywhere were on cell phones. There was a line at the pay phone.
Weird, I thought and moved on.
In The Pub, someone had set up a TV in the corner, which was also odd. UMBC students don't watch TV at school unless they're watching a chess game on the closed-circuit TVs in The Commons. There was a crowd around the TV. I went and bought my orange soda and meandered over to the crowd. It was around 11 a.m. at this point. I had no clue what was going on.
What I saw on the TV...it couldn't be real. I walked away.
I walked a slow circle around campus, drinking my orange soda, and I thought about what I had seen. For perhaps the first time in weeks, I thought about someone other than my asshole boyfriend and my own pathetic self. But I still didn't believe that what I had seen could be real.
Or maybe I didn't want it to be real.
I had no cell phone to call home (not that it probably would have worked anyway), and I was afraid to stop someone and ask. How does one ask a question like that? "Excuse me, how are you? Fine, thanks. Yes, I wanted to ask: Did I just see the World Trade Center collapse into rubble?" And what would they answer? "Yup, you saw correctly. Have a nice day!"
So I wandered back to The Pub and stood with the other students for a while, watching the TV. In a big crowd when you can't hear the sound and you don't know what's going on, the images from that day don't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps because you can't believe that what you see is real. Or you don't want to believe that it is real. I stood for a while and finished my orange soda. I had more classes that day, but I went to my car. If what I'd seen had been true, then I didn't belong in school. And I wanted to put on the radio to see if that would tell me what was going on.
It did. All of the radio stations had been taken over by special broadcasts. I believe it was Dan Rather who said, "For those of you just joining us..." and I started to sob then because I knew that it was true. And I cried the way home, just as I'd cried on the way to school, but it was for a different reason this time.
The day of 9/11/01 was such a beautiful day. I don't think that those who didn't live through it will ever understand what a beautiful day it was. The sky was clear and the sun was shining. The birds sang. It was warm and, for once, not humid. It seemed impossible for such awful events to happen on such a beautiful day.
My dad was at the cardiologist's office, running on a treadmill for a stress test when the planes hit. He'd had a quintuple bypass the summer before.
Bobby, I would come to find out, was on his way to--ironically--a class called International Terrorism when he got word of the attacks. Bobby's history of studying terrorism is an interesting one. Because of him, I knew the names Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda before they were in the headlines. We used to go on hikes and talk about our respective studies. I talked about psychology and he talked about political science, namely how the US was ignoring the threat of terrorism, how we would one day be victims of our own ignorance. Especially, he said, Islamic fundamentalists like Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda.
When he took International Terrorism that year, it was not a popular class. In subsequent years, it filled up almost as soon as it opened. But that year, terrorism was "their" problem, not our own. The big political discussion then was the 2000 electile dysfunction between Al Gore and George W. Bush and all the subsequent Supreme Court snafu.
So folks, if you still naively believe that we were caught by surprise that day, guess again. The experts--and by this, I mean people who study political science and intelligence, not friends-of-friends who end up heading intelligence agencies--were screaming their dear little heads off about the threat of radical fundamentalist groups like Al-Quaeda. But of course, no one listened. Perhaps we didn't want to listen. Heck, Bobby was an undergraduate and talking about it. But even in undergraduate circles, no one listened. His study of terrorism in the time before 9/11 was considered a bit odd and certainly impractical.
Until, of course, it happened.
Bobby has always been my barometer when it comes to world events. I will admit naivete to most world news. It literally makes me sick to read that kind of stuff on a regular basis, especially since I don't trust the media enough to believe them on matters pertaining to Hollywood gossip much less international relations. So I don't follow the news. I always asked Bobby to explain things to me and make sense of them.
Never before, though, had I needed sense made of something like I did on 9/11. And Bobby, of course, wasn't there because of stupid, stupid me.
The man I was seeing at the time didn't want to talk about it. I suppose that in his highly dramatic personal life--in which I'd become so foolishly ensnared--the deaths of nearly 3,000 didn't matter nearly so much. And so I spoke to no one about it and cried about it nearly every day for many months.
I remember that my significant other at the time asked me once if I ever missed Bobby. I told him that I missed most talking to Bobby, because the best thing between the two of us--whether friends or lovers or husband and wife--has been that we can talk to each other and untangle nearly anything. I desperately needed him to untangle this for me. I wanted to understand why and how something like that came to happen. I wanted to cry to him without feeling foolish, like I did when I admitted how much 9/11 hurt to my significant other at the time.
My significant other became angry with my answer. "You can talk to me," he said. "I'm intelligent too; I can talk with you about anything that Bobby would!" But even as he said that, I knew that we could not. Bobby will listen to me blather. He listens to me blather about Elves and writing all of the time now. He makes me feel like what I have to say is important, even when--really--it's not. And he does have a wonderful knack for untangling things for me. He knows that I am intelligent, yes, but also high-strung and apt to see certain things in terms of emotion rather than logic. He also knows how averse I am to the news and the media in general. He is patient when I rant and tender in telling me when I am wrong. Carlos--my significant other at the time--was none of those things, is far too self-centered to ever be any of those things.
Bobby and I still worked together at The Piece; we even went to the national sundae-making competition together and won the award for Best Teamwork despite the fact that we didn't speak aside from shouting, "Hot fudge!" and "Hand me a banana knife!" at each other. My mom worked there too at the time and wrote the schedule, and she'd been careful to give us opposite shifts for many months. But perhaps in her motherly wisdom, that slowly began to change. Bobby and I began to work together more and more, often the only two cooks in the kitchen. Slowly, we began to speak again. We spoke of politics and world events. He made sense of things to me, even though I dared not admit to him how emotionally frail I was, over my personal life and hurting over 9/11 still.
In November, Carlos and I broke up. I finally did the right thing, gave him an ultimatum (knowing even as I did that he wouldn't take it), and stuck to my resolution. I've never spoken to him since. Suddenly, it was much easier to talk to Bobby. We began to see each other outside of work. He took me to Chili's one night after The Piece closed for a late dinner, and we finally talked about 9/11. About everything. I cried, I remember that, and was glad that we were the only ones left in the restaurant. He held my hand, I remember that too. He told me that he wished he'd known that I'd never talked to anyone about it, but what can I say? I am stubborn and stoic. I don't like to admit that I am hurting, even to the people I love the most.
It is strange, how the two became entwined: the worst time of my life and perhaps the darkest day in modern American history. How one solved the other and the other began to--if not solve--at least make sense of the first. At least for me. How somewhere in there, I healed.
So I join the legions who will always remember exactly what they were doing and felt at the moment that they heard the news. For me, I was full of self-pity, and that ended that day. Things began to change, if slowly.
And I don't want to forget that day. I'm afraid that some have, but I don't want to. I will cry over it, every year and quite a bit in between too. The wound will never heal. But I don't want it to.
~oOo~
The question to ask now: Have we learned anything from all of this??
Sadly, my belief is "no."
Bobby's honor's thesis was of course on terrorism: more specifically, how to fight terrorism and whether we are doing a good job of it.
The "War on Terror" it is called. But is it even a war? According to the current administration, it is. Through a dodgy system of reasoning that has eluded me for many years now, we are at war in Iraq because of terrorism. Or that's what we were told.
But how does one fight terrorism? Can it be done with tanks and planes and armies, like we've fought wars before? A terrorist cell was discovered right here in my hometown of Baltimore. What good are tanks and planes and armies in eliminating a terrorist cell in an American city? Or--more importantly--discovering it in the first place?
As we pour our resources into buying more tanks and planes and armies, first responders (police, firefighters, and emergency medical services) see their funding routinely cut and have trouble getting the equipment that they need to respond in a national emergency. What intelligence operations we do have spend more time chasing their tails than getting anything done. Homeland Security spends more time covering their asses in the instance of another attack than they do actually trying to prevent another attack. Can anyone explain to me how we can spend millions of dollars on a "terror alert system" that learning theory shows will not cause any favorable change in human behavior, yet funding is cut for first responders? Or intelligence operations continue to get tiny budgets as compared to the military and customs officers are filling up their service vehicles out of their own pockets? We can spend billions on missile systems and aircraft carriers, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on a hiring freeze?
And we have not forgotten 9/11?
I think that we have. Or at least, we have allowed an administration to come into power that has.
I was at the ice rink the other night when Katie Couric was interviewing Bush II about whether we are safer five years later than we were on 9/11. If "safer" can be defined by our increased suspicion of brown-skinned people, then yes, I suppose we are. If "safer" is defined by having enough intelligence and local law enforcement to hopefully discover the next attack before it happens and enough first responders to assist if it does, then no, I don't think that we are any safer. When I look at what goes on between Bobby's workplace and mine, I really don't trust those in power to care about their own careers and good names to make wise decisions for the safety of this country. The low men and women on the totem pole are the ones who care and do their work (versus kissing ass), so they will never make it to a place where their voices actually matter.
In the meantime, we've seen 9/11 used as an excuse for racism--up to and including murder--such that an Indian man who sold jewelry in the mall where I worked at The Piece had to put up a sign saying, "I am an American citizen of Indian descent" in order not to lose business and be harassed by people who thought that he was Middle Eastern because he had dark skin and wore a turban. As though he should even have to make this excuse in order to be treated like every other American citizen, even if he was Middle Eastern.
We've seen 9/11 used as an excuse to trample civil rights, Constitutional rights, and sometimes human rights too, especially in our dealings overseas. And it has become acceptable--sometimes even popular!--to use 9/11 to justify this too. After the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, a good percentage of Americans said that we acted acceptably because we were only doing to them what they do to us. And people honestly thought that this kind of thinking was okay.
A circle of violence, anyone? This is why I am a pacifist. Someone has to have the courage to stop it.
What we have not used 9/11 as an excuse to do is to take measures so that it does not happen again. Bill Maher once brought up an interesting point: After 9/11, we all went on about how much we love our first responders. Heartwarming commercials about how much we love and appreciate police and firefighters filled the air. We gave them standing ovations in parades and NYPD and NYFD hats and clothing became immensely popular. Yet when it came time to spend a little of the surplus, where did the money go? Toward raising the dismal salaries of those who devote--and sometimes give--their lives in order to protect us? Those who climbed the stairs of a burning building doused in jet fuel in order to save even one life? Or maybe we'd give our first responders a tax cut?
Or maybe we'd give the rich a tax cut and our first responders a pat on the back and a show of solidarity by wearing an NYPD hat and listing Third Watch as our favorite television show?
As far as intelligence goes, the Department of Homeland Security was once called "a bunch of old generals sitting around a telling war stories" for a reason. Because, naturally, with a war-mongering administration like ours, homeland security belongs in the hands of old military generals, not in the hands of law enforcement or intelligence agents who might have actually done something novel like studying terrorism. And what has DHS done aside from making TSA akin to the Post Office in terms of imbecility and inefficiency? And managing to botch the worst disaster on American soil since 9/11--that would be Hurricane Katrina, for those of you living in cardboard boxes--even when they had days worth of warning? And we expect them to be able to respond with a moment's notice? (Or even seven minute's notice, if they're busy reading My Pet Goat with first-graders?)
Slapping a magnetic sticker on the car isn't remembering 9/11. Nor is it remembered by electing an administration that would rather promote racism than cease our dependence on foreign oil (because brown-skinned people don't give campaign contributions but the oil lobby sure does), an administration that thinks that removing a dictator from Iraq while the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks runs free--and unlooked for--in the mountains of Afghanistan is okay.
Let's remember 9/11.