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No more kinder, gentler Shadow. I be telling it raw and true. Ignore me at your peril and from here on you can call me “Dissident”.
In case anyone cares, and I don’t really care if you do or not, here are my thoughts on the 6th anniversary of our generation’s day of infamy September 11th. Day late and a dollar short, I know, but any good rant should steep for a day and I was having too many bad memories of past horrors and horrors to come to hit the keys yesterday.
First off the “holiday” of “Patriot Day” as September 11th has now been deemed for all time is stolen and Maine and Massachusetts should have sued the federal government for heisting it. “Patriots’ Day” is a civic holiday that both states celebrate in April to commemorate the battles of Lexington and Concord in The Revolutionary War. You know; the one where real patriots fought and died for their liberties at the birth of our nation. I admit I just learned this startling fact and I’m trying to remember if there was any outcry at the time the bill was signed in December of 2001. The outcry should have been that our government should have been finding out who was responsible instead of making up “feel good” bullshit holidays.
I’m truly sorry to all the victims of 9/11 and their families but not a one of the three thousand was being a “patriot” when the planes crashed, anymore than they usually were anyway. They were going about their daily business like all of us good drone workers do day by day and they were the unfortunate victim of our government’s chickens coming home to roost.
Whether you believe 19 guys, some miraculously alive afterward apparently, hijacked four planes and used them as weapons, or one of the various conspiracy theories one thing is clear. Nothing has been the same since. It should be. We were told it would be. That we should go about our daily business. That NOTHING should change or the terrorists have won. That didn’t last long and a moment that could have united this nation like never before was used to divide it like almost never before. When this evil machine we call our government decided it needed drum beats to war and an excuse to deny us some of our basic American civil liberties the mantra suddenly became “September 11th changed everything”
This is when I realized we were probably on a fast highway to fuckedville as a country and in the time since, painfully little time, the degeneration has proceeded pretty much as I expected it would.
The home of the brave has become the land of the fearful and paranoid. We have become collectively as a country complicit in our own downfall. Authors of our own destruction as a free nation. We’ve allowed for too long, long before George Bush the Second but not too long before his daddy, our country to be run by dishonest and disreputable men. Our standards have fallen farther than I ever thought possible. We had DAN QUAYLE as a VP for fucks sake. That should have told us enough about the decision making process of the Bush line of DNA right there to never again let any of them have the reigns of power. To Mr. Quayle’s benefit however the man who currently holds the office he was once a heartbeat away from makes him look like Steven Hawking.
But I digress. Patriot Day. The day we now celebrate the biggest embarrassment this country has ever been involved in. The biggest tactical blunder of the century. Biggest lack of response to a crisis except maybe for Katrina and biggest disaster that didn’t have to happen. Forgive me if I didn’t break out the party hat yesterday or go to one of the exploitive memorial services. I mourn the dead, I truly do. I mourn our country more.
Patriot Day. The people that named this holiday don’t know the meaning of the word. A patriot was Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and Nathan Hale who, I hope, spit his last words into the faces of his executioners. Martin Luther King Jr. was a patriot. Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Kennedy was a patriot. In my opinion very few people since these prophets of light were taken from us have come close to being in their league. That’s probably because it has been a fairly historical constant that patriots don’t always meet the most peaceful of ends. Tends to scare some folks to sleep.
“How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?”
Good question Mr. Marley. Wish I had the answer for the questions in your “Redemption Song”
The ones who have the answers we need seem to meet untimely fates before they’re allowed to tell too many people. I’d include Jesus in this list but despite all the people he has been allowed to reach, few enough of them seem to actually “get it”. I did after the first reading. Not a hard plot. Love each other; don’t fuck each other over.
September 11th changed everything. Damned right it did. It allowed the evils of our nation to emerge unchecked. Let the vilest elements of a corrupt system corrupt it absolutely. Perhaps beyond the point of repair by lawful means as the rule of law, our Constitution, has been used to line someone’s parakeet cage. September 11th changed the sacred document we have lived by for over 225 years. A plan for a grand experiment that one day and one disaster allowed evil men to dismantle in six short years. If things keep going as they seem to be which is inevitable conflict with Iran then the cycle of our empires eventual fall will be in its last phase. Worst case scenario is that civilization itself could be torn asunder except of course for the protected few who have the means to escape the carnage of their folly.
Patriot Day. I think we should continue to call September 11th Patriot Day only if next year at this time is the day we finally decide in complete solidarity as a nation that we’re not going to live like this anymore. No taxation without representation. My money will not go to fund your wars. No security without our freedoms in tact or we deserve neither and will receive worse. No more criminals in government, ever, for any significant amount of time. On this one point I differ from our sacred Constitution. It needs to be easier to remove an obvious danger to our nation from threats domestic. Barring that, we the people will have to get our hands dirty once again as the patriots of the 18th century did. Remember the dead, remember the deed. Don’t let them die in vain by letting them be the catalyst for the death of a nation. Ignore me at your peril
Dissident
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