It's arrived again. Another September 11 anniversary.
Now that we're doing for the second time, we've gotten good at it. It's that time of year to "remember the victims", tell ourselves that September 11 "only made us stronger", and (if we're really feeling rebellious) issue demands to no one in particular that some unspecified group needs to stop "threatening our freedom".
This last bromide is personally the most annoying. How these limp-wristed Republicans can start mouthing the same, old, pre-fab nonsense when discussing the deaths of 3,000 people and the potential for thousands more to die I have no idea. Can we make an exception, and say what we really mean for once? The threat is to our existence, not to our "freedom". If and when the United States is mostly annihilated, those remaining few people can worry about their lack of freedom. In the meantime, the rest of us should be more concerned that we might not live for the day when all the American newspapers are only publishing Islamic propaganda.
Declaring that our "freedom" is being threatened sounds like typical Young Republican Club party line. I guess in the past, threats against "freedom" were sufficient as puffery for the agenda at hand. (Like a judge being prevented from displaying the Ten Commandments, which a typical Republican would call an attack on his "freedom".) Every time I hear someone characterize this war we're in as a fight for "freedom", I wonder whether these guys are actually longing to relive the Cold War and the Reagan presidency.
These Islamic terrorists want to kill us. We need to kill them first and end the governments which make them possible. In other words, we need to kill and bomb, and occasionally threaten to kill and bomb. The latter is diplomacy.
We need to stop "remembering" the victims. Anyone who "remembers" the victims of September 11 without making the mental connection with what should be done as a result of the September 11 attacks, is not remembering the victims. What they're doing is turning the most horrific, the most real event of their lives into a PR opportunity. In the case of the political speeches, it's a PR opportunity in the usual sense of the term. In the case of Joe Schmo making an equivalent comment to a coworker, it's personal PR. In either case, it's people trampling over several thousand graves to show how fucking caring they are.
Fuck that. Show me how caring you are by telling me where the next bomb should land. Otherwise, when the Sears Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge goes down, what are you going to do? Just add the dates of their demise to your calendar and recycle your September 11 speech? And then do the same when the rest of NYC and DC go down?
There's one simple thing we can do on this date to pay actual respect to the people who died in the attacks. For one 24-hour period, please, let's not be completely full of shit.
