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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-09-10

Ever Get The Feeling Somebody's Feeding Us More Rope? 

There's an axiom of war, either military or political: when your enemy is destroying itself, stay out of the way. There's a corrolary of that that goes "give him enough rope to hang himself."

If I were America's enemies, I think I might be inclined, at this moment, to just stay out of the way.

Tomorrow is 9/11. Will you be able to tell this from going to any public school tomorrow morning? Not very likely. Could you tell this from the evening news broadcast tonight? No. Hell, even Congress assembled last night to pay tribute to . . . politics. A policy debate that has NOTHING to do with the eighth anniversary of the day America got punched in the nose.

And in the midst of this, we are all totally caught up in whether Joe Wilson was mean to the President. This, only a few moments after the President called his opponents liars. I half-expected a "Gary Condit: Where Is He Now" story on the news tonight.

What brought us together has been forgotten.

Sure, many MANY people will be marching in D.C. on Saturday, which will probably have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the debate at hand. The simple fact that one side has suddenly discovered that it is strong when it acts in concert doesn't really mean that we're more unified.

In fact, we are so dis-unified that at the site of the main attacks on 9/11, there is, right now, a . . . hole in the ground.

EIGHT YEARS, PEOPLE!!

It took us less time than this to go from the first generation of supersonic airplanes to the FRACKIN' MOON! Surely, we can build a stupid memorial to the innocent victims of 23 Islamofascist terrorists!

Can we agree, maybe, to at least put something there in remembrance of the children killed in the daycare?

No. The actual news of tomorrow will be polls about a speech, donations to a political opponent, one of the President's cronies telling somebody how to create an underage prostitution ring and hide it from the taxman, and, no doubt, some other completely unimportant minor story about how another of the President's political opponents did something stupid.

In the meantime, school children will pass the day taking another set of diagnostic tests so public schools can show an anxious public that we can quantify brilliance, industry, laziness, and stupidity. And, having dodged one political indoctrination earlier this week, they can rest in their desks secure in the knowledge that there will be no more uncomfortable political and societal reminders that people hate us.

I am an American. I remember what it felt like to watch the second plane fly into the tower that morning while I was changing my daughter's diaper. I remember the hole in my gut as I was driving my children to school. And I will once again be dismayed that the schools will not be doing anything about it . . . just like they were eight years ago. And I will pause in the morning to recognize the sacrifices that have been required of Americans that both culminated in and have been the result of 9/11.

I thought those attacks would change the world. In fact, I was writing a book that I thought I had to give up on because the premise was supposedly blown out of the water by 9/11. I think I can take that project up again.

But what I'd really like to do is help actually reunite the country around some set of values and principles. We've become, as Pat Buchanan writes today, like a married couple that has been so at each others' throats for so long that we don't remember what brought us together to begin with, much less care.

I'm under no illusion that things are actually so much worse today than they've ever been--our current Vice President has never been in a duel (thank God!). And this President didn't have to sneak out a bathroom window on the way to his inauguration to avoid an assassination attempt. But there are, now, SYSTEMS that are in place and being constructed every day that almost guarantee that there is no mechanism remaining to reclaim our right to "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

But that's a debate for another day. For today, for this 9/11, I'd like to simply remember that Americans died for no reason because we were not vigilant enough and, perhaps, we were a little naive.

Tomorrow I'll think about the rest of it.
Posted by: Michael / 9/10/2009 11:06:00 PM

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