9/11, a decade on

It was 7:30 in the morning or so.  I was at the office.  My folks, who’d been visiting, were at Denver International Airport, waiting for their flight.

And I posted this:

Nothing is Certain

As I write this, news outlets are reporting (with ghastly pictures) that two planes have run into the World Trade Center. Given that each plane hit a separate tower, my initial assumption is that this was a deliberate terrorist act.

In an free and open society, there is no such thing as perfect safety.

Damn their eyes, and damn those who overreact to this.

And here we are, a decade later.  One war, possibly justified, poorly planned.  Another, long-planned, poorly justified, just as poorly planned.  An economy in shambles at least in part due to that.  Some of the bad guys who planned this dead.  Many, many more arisen in their place.  An ever-growing security apparatus in place where government agencies watch us with little to no oversight. Air travel is more likely A few brief moments of world support and sympathy squandered, along with any perception of moral high ground, with torture and renditions and black prisons now not only open secrets, but defended as a patriotic and moral imperative.

Part of me wants to say that the 9/11 attacks were, though tragic, not something we should be obsessing about.  How long did we continue to mourn and commemorate, nationally, Pearl Harbor, the Maine, or the Jonestown Flood, or the Galveston Hurricane, or the  Battle of the Kasserine Pass, or the San Francisco Earthquake, or the Chicago Fire?  We’ve suffered horrible disasters before.  We’ve suffered attacks, and defeats.  And we mourn, and we survive, and we come back, and we do better.

And maybe that’s the difference here, and why we do need to keep talking about 9/11. Because something really awful happened that day — something beyond the awful death and destruction in NYC and Arlington and Pennsylvania.

We changed.  We changed ourselves, and we let others change us, take control and advantage of the attacks.  We let ourselves become a nation where waterboarding is no longer torture and off-limits.  Where we take off our shoes to get through security, then watch a little kid get groped.  Where we don’t mind that the government can listen to our phone calls, check out our library check-0ut lists, or pretty much anything they want, without a warrant, or (if there is a warrant) without your knowing it happened, just because “national security” or “terror!” is mentioned.  Where we’re so phobic about a world religion that makes up 0.6% of our population that people are willing to argue with a straight face that Those People shouldn’t be allowed to build any more houses of worship here because they’re not really a religion. Where we spend so much money on “off-budget” wars that, hey, surprise, we don’t have the money (or aren’t willing to raise it) to restore a collapsed economy, extend unemployment benefits, rebuild our bridges, or fly into space.

So there is reason to mourn, and remember, and be resolved to survive, and to do better.

It’s just not the one you’ll find talked about on the mainstream media and the talk shows.