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Unfortunately, we're a country that was deeply, badly traumatized by 9/11. That kind of trauma can have one of two effects; it can either make you wiser or it can damage you to the extent that you are very vulnerable for a very long time.
But it's not just the trauma, it's the state you're in when you're traumatized. America was an adolescent country with all of the attributes of adolescence--a sense of immortality, a rather rigid, self-important idea of having a grasp on what's right and what's wrong, and a clumsy if endearing need to strut and pretend that we're the studliest, the smartest, the best breeding stock on earth. Then we were shown, horribly, that we're as vulnerable as anyone else and that we're just another tribe trying very hard to survive (and I'll say here that I believe very much that we have some good ways of doing it). We haven't gotten wiser as a country; we're still too freaked out and the manipulators got to us too fast.
So now we're hurt, rattled, infuriated that everything we naively believed about ourselves isn't truth after all. We're obsessive about trying to heal a hurt that we haven't yet learned much from.
THEN someone like Terry Jones (or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin) comes along. He has self-important soap to sell, born in part out of his own personal issues but neatly dovetailed into the national terror of what happened and what might happen. He knows how to become important by holding up the trauma again and again, and generalizing it as well. Now everything's potentially dangerous, Islam, Communists, Socialists, corporations, areas of the country, ad infinitum. He'll fix those bastards! He'll show them who's right and who's wrong! We don't have to grow up; we're AMERICA, we're Christians (this has nothing to do with Christianity of course; it's just the horse he rode in on).
Then the spinners get hold of it. Keep us traumatized and we'll keep compulsively coming back to check and see if something else terrible is headed our way. Give us any lucky rabbit's foot you can to keep us from the truth that we have to grow up and deal with the world in a whole different way. We don't want to. We're STUDS, for Chrissake! Aren't we? Mom?
Then the pundits get hold of it and repeat ad nauseum, the corporate sponsors and politicians who can create influence and peddle a product leap in to make a profit, and voila! We all keep ourselves ginned up and in a traumatized state, unable to learn any lessons, unable to look at ourselves in a new way, unable to do anything except to continue to do to ourselves for almost ten years what was done to us one morning in September.
This country is like an abused kid, and people like Terry Jones and the people who forefront him will insure that the abuse just keeps on coming, unless those of us who want to grow up and become a healthy, wiser, more realistic nation get off our duffs and start doing something rather than letting them create our world.
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