It has already been ten years since the towers fell. Since the Pentagon was attacked. Ten years since a plane was hijacked by terrorists, only to have the passengers thwart their efforts and crash themselves into the ground in Pennsylvania. Has it really been ten years already? It baffles me how quickly time flies.
As you might have guessed by my previously cynical posts, this isn’t going to be a piece on how tragic that day was, nor how great our country was to come together thereafter. Those are both truths that are being told time and again. What I want to focus on is, what have we as Americans, as individuals, as a country, and as a global society, what have we accomplished in those ten years.
The first couple of years after the attacks, the world mourned for the United States and the victims of 9/11, as we all did. We were labeled courageous, patriotic, heroic, driven, and unwavering. These we all were as we searched out Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden in the first few years of the millennium.
But what then? Then we used our “go get ‘em” attitude to seek out Iraqi insurgents and WMDs, most of which never existed or we never found. The world started wondering if we had gone rogue, and as a US Navy sailor at that time, I wondered the same. We were chasing phantom threats, and spending all of our taxpayers’ money (and borrowed money) doing it. We blasted through all of our allies’ good will too, which wasn’t cheap either.
The other thing we did was inappropriately label Muslims as ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’. Luckily, we didn’t go to the extremes of 1941-42 when all Japanese-Americans were thrown into internment camps, but we did unfairly demonize the Islamic religion. Luckily for us, Muslim-Americans were not going to wage an all out war on the US and heed the call to arms that Bin Laden wanted. Otherwise, we would be a markedly different country today.
Not only did we demonize Muslims, but we tore the veil of civil and human rights to shreds and stomped all over any freedoms that most Americans have. That continues to this day, and all in the name of “safety and protection” of the American people. I don’t think creating a new multi-billion dollar department of homeland security and transportation security administration has really made people feel much safer. It’s all an illusion, and it’s time to stop letting our so-called fears of terrorism to overrule our freedoms as Americans. You want security at an airport? Give a Marine a fully automatic M16 and put one of them at every checkpoint. That will be a much better deterrent than the fat-assed job security seeking morons that think that every bottle of baby formula is a damn bomb!
The other thing we did post-9/11 was destroy our entire economy. We wanted people to keep spending money after the towers fell, so we dropped interest rates to the lowest they’ve ever been, just so people could get cheap money. Well, we’re idiots with money, and look where that brought us! We brought the entire civilized world to the brink of disaster, and it still could happen no doubt, all because we forgot what happened to Gordon Gecko after he stated “Greed is good!”
The other sad truth about post 9/11 America is that we have basically handed over the defense department to the likes of billion dollar companies that create war machines. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the decades on bombs, jets, guns, and the highest and most technologically advanced weapons ever seen just to send our troops into areas where road side bombs that are 30 years old are still killing our men and women daily. If history has told us anything at all, we need to stop spending so much money on R&D for defense contracts, just so that those weapons can be sold to foreign countries, only to have those same countries turn around and fight the US years down the road (Iran, Iraq, Russia, etc.).
Now, I’m not entirely bitter about everything that our moronic government has done since 9/11. We did kill Osama Bin Laden (the way we should have done it initially by the way), we took down Saddam Hussein (so Baby Bush could get patted on the head by Daddy Bush), and we reminded the world not to fuck with us because we will cram an MK48 Missile up your ass if you do!
I am bitter, however, that we alienated our allies, refused the warnings of the UN, decided that spending money to spur growth was more important than fixing fundamental issues at home, made Americans feel uncomfortable in their own homes, and tripled our national debt in less than a decade! It’s time to pull in the reins, rethink our long term strategies, and stop acting like we’re doing all this in the name of freedom and the American People. Stop lying to me and telling me that you’re staring at my junk in an x-ray machine for my safety! If anyone believes that load of crap, then the terrorist have won, our government is becoming as close to a fascist-dictatorship as it can without outright claiming so, and our populace is getting as dumb as it possibly could.
Don’t let the “Remember 9/11″ call turn into a “Let go of all you hold dear so that the government can ‘protect’ you” mantra!
