9/11 Reflections: The Nation We Could Have Been, The Nation We Are

Remember this. He lied about the greatest tragedy to hit the nation in the 21st century. He’s now president. 

My coworker Matt waved me over to his cubicle, right after the first tower was hit. We looked at each other in disbelief. Had the pilot had a heart attack? What the hell?

The second plane hit and we knew this was not an. accident. Within a couple of hours, after the crash at the Pentagon, and the thwarted flight 93, the pall over the office was cast. Once the pilots had been identified as coming from a Middle Eastern country, my friend Amy turned to me and said things were going to get much worse of Black and Brown people. In the U.S.

We were told to go home and be with our families and loved ones, and I, like many people, called friends in New York to see if they were okay. I was shaken and concerned. But I was also additionally rocked by what this would mean for the nation, for the world. I did not like the Bush administration and under normal circumstances, he would have been a one-term president.

Over the next two days, I spent time with friends, talking to family, and attending vigils a interfaith services. The initial response from the world was compassion, support, solidarity, and goodwill. It wouldn’t take too long before the Bush administration decided to pivot to reframing this as a full-out war. Yes, yes, the War on Terror; but also, the War for the Iraqi Oil Fields, the War on Common Sense, and of course, the two decades long war in Afghanistan. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Heck of a job, there, W. You obliterated almost every bit of goodwill and support in a matter of days.

Had Bush and his puppet masters Cheney and Rumsfeld pursued a measured, intelligence-driven operation to find Bin-Laden and his cohorts, had we not used the trumped-up bullshit about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and had we not decided to act like John Wayne on a steroid and Viagra binge, it is very likely we would not be in the place we are now; severely fucked.

The Nation We Could Have Been

Absent the Yellow  Alerts, the tabre-rattleing, the fear-mongering, the demonization of all Middle Eastern -looking people, the Fox 25 amplification, the “My Way or the Highway” attitude by Bush and his enablers, including not a few on the Left, for fuck’s sake, this country and the world would look a lot different today. We might have more secure alliances, healthier economies, less power-mad “strong men” (they’re not), and possibly a more peaceful world overall.

We could have been more untied and less divided;  but instead, and you cannot lay what ensued on the. Right’s doorstep or solely on the Republicans’ heads, we opted for anger, fear, and unbridled payback. By the time the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, we knew - we KNEW - that Iraq had nothing to do with the attack and if anyone had paid attention to non-US news services, that Iraq didn’t have WMD. 

“That man tried to kill my daddy.” We had had dumb presidents before, but W. took the cake. Well, for a few years, anyway. But here was his chance to prove his how big his testicles were and the frat boy nepo baby Prez went full bore into his role. Stupidly, flaggingly, laughably, but for the tragic consequences. 

And this stupidity infected so many. The bellicose bulllshit I heard and saw firsthand. One person dear to me declared that “you just feel like bloodying somebody” (to which, his wife, older son, and I replied, “no, you don’t”); or another person who should have known better claimed they were boycotting French made wines because they weren’t going to support cowards who refused to join Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” You know, the French, without whom we might not even have a country and our allies in two world wars, and so on and so forth.

We didn’t have to be the nation we’ve become. 

We are arguably dumber now. We are far more divided, And we are a pariah on the world stage.

And yes, while the seeds of all this reach back farther into the past, the catalyst was 9/11. When we marched against the invasion of Iraq in Boston, most of us had a feeling of how dark it was going to get. Two terms of the Bush Administration set us on a path to ruin. The corruption expanded (look if you like his daughter fine, I do, too; but Diick Cheney is an evil fuck who you should never go duck hunting with). Karl Rove was behind the scenes of so much sketchy, shady events, it’s astonishing that the electorate didn’t wise up sooner, 

Oh, wiat. The electorate that has never been fully engaged enough to care about the effect of its choices or its apathy. Silly me.

We’ve had ample opportunity for course correction; Obama was a breath of fresh air, but even there, we have a man who expanded the powers of the Executive Branch, pushed through warrantless surveillance and the authorization of executing US citizens on foreign soil. But this would be nothing compared to what happened when a failed businessman, reality-show (well, “reality”) host and huckster, rose to become president against one fo the strongest smartest women in American politics. Did I have reservations about Hillary? Sure, because no one gets a free pass, but only a moron would have voted against her and only fools would support Trump because - oh, I don’t know, “Bernie didn’t get the nomination.” We are a nation of morons and fools. “Moron” is a terrible word, but we are a nation facing the results of terrible decisions made by voters. Repeatedly.

We got another reprieve. 

I don’t need to tout the gains made by the Biden administration but the tactical errors his administration made by not going to the mat and hammering back at the GOP helped usher in a new era of dystopia, one from which we are not going to recover anytime soon.

9/11 was a gift to the Far Right. The polarization capitalized on by the alt-conservatives’ in this country has led us to this place of fear and hatred. Think this is hyperbole? I’m old enough to remember when it would have been impossible for a president, let alone an entire administration to be this stupid, ugly, and frankly, evil. 

On the other hand, and I don’t care what this sounds like, people were smarter; they weren’t so quick to fall for as much bullshit in the pre-Internet eras. That doesn’t mean politicians didn’t lie and people weren’t gullible (the Gulf of Tonkin? “No new taxes”, “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”, etc.), but there was also a better chance that some would be held to account. Okay, practically no one was held to account for Iran-Contra, but that in itself is telling; Reagan set the template for an imperial presidency that other pikers like Nixon could only dream of, but that a grifter like Trump could certainly build on.

We have guns, lots and lots of guns.

Post-9/11, it’s astounding how mass shootings have taken off and how more and more people began arming themselves. Against what? Al-quaida? Please. Against other Americans? Now you’ve got it. That the rise of people like the Right Wing Troll who was just shot and killed - until we start saying and remembering the names of other victims of shootings in this country, I don’t want to give air time to anyone who actually argued for violence and more shooting, such as this fellow. 

Did he deserve it? Did he deserve to be shot? No, of course not. But his death is emblematic of the kind of nation that apparently Republicans are okay with. And his death gives them, so they think, the right to go after “the Radical Left” which at this point, means people like me. Like you. Or just anyone they don’t like.

We are a nation of violence, guns, and greed; I say “we” because I live here. I don’t like violence, guns or greed, but I’m not so naive to not see how all three govern, not just political but social, discourse and comportment. We now have the National Guard in DC and Chicago and likely to be deployed in other cities whether they like it or not; we have gerrymandering on a massive scale, LGBTQ+ and minorities once again marginalized and subject to state harassment, arrest, and/or disappearance.

If you though the erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law and due process took a hit after 9/11, take a look-see here and now.

We are not led by courageous, smart, or good people. Every single one is driven by an insatiable greed for more money, more power, longer terms in office to profit more from that office. To believe otherwise is to be a fool.

By the end of his second term, support for W had fallen precipitously. By the end of his first term, the current Occupier was clearly a one-term president. What happened was a complicit press continued to report his every tweet and more damningly, a complicit and compliant/submissive Republican Party fell into lockstep and allowed him to govern despite being out of office.

There should have been mass uprisings then. This asshole had organized a coup and should have been in prison on January, 7, 2017. But instead, an entire party gave itself over to this sentient mass of avarice and venality.

This is what I think of when I think of 9/11 these days. The lives lost, the false patriotism, the toxic nationalism and a strategic dismantling of any norms that might have kept us from the precipice. We’re not staring into the abyss; we are falling into it.

I say this a lot; we will keep organizing, protesting, suing, petitioning, lobbying, and showing up at town halls and at chambers of commerce. Wherever we can speak up; wherever we can make our voices heard.

Yes, these are dangerous times. With the aforementioned erosion of civiil liberties and the increased military presence in cities across the land (ICE, of course, but also, the ominous deployment of troops to cities whose crime rates don’t warrant the “assistance”), it feels almost inevitable that the suspension of habeas corpus is next and the rounding up of people who have voiced opinions that run against the regime’s rhetoric or worse, that present FACTS that meet the lies of the regime is coming soon. 

We have no guarantees that the Occupier and his Regime won’t suspend elections. He said it himself, if elected, he’ll “fix everything and then [we] won’t need any more elections.”

I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. We’ve heard that “9/11 was an inside job”; I don’t believe that, but it was an opportunity too good for Halliburton, BP, and the rest to pass up and put their Texas puppet front and center to drive the country into the ground.

Was Charlie Kirk - there, I mentioned his name - set up? I don’t necessarily believe that, either; but that we have a bunch of would-be gangsters in house, it wouldn’t surprise me. What’s murder if it means that people will quit talking about Epstein and who might be compromised if all the files are released. Get people - especially those bleeding heart libs to start babbling about gun control, as long as they get off that other inconvenience. 

And yes, guns. And yes, Epstein. And yes, there are literal rapists in our midst, in the highest offices and yes, there are lawmakers who are raping the social fabric of this country. 

To repeat myself, this may not have begun with 9/11 - the origins of where we are began much earlier - but it helped that we had an enemy that we could point to and an indefinable “war” that we could wage against anyone - including ourselves. 

Almost a quarter century later, and we aren’t falling to some jihadist terrorist regime from the Middle East; we are falling to homegrown terrorist willing to let us collapse from within.