How long can a political party justify its worth on one date?

[fujiyama]

It's been just over five years. I don't live anywhere near NYC and have no friends or relatives in the city.

But the day hurt. And each time I see the NY skyline, something about it just doesn't seem right...and a new building will likely eventually rise, but I'm sure each time I see it, I'll still remember the towers.

But it's all been said. It's all been felt. We saw the sympathy from people worldwide. We saw anger, confusion, hatred and sadness here.

Since then the ruling party has exploited the day incessantly. They hijacked it, making it as though only conservatives died, and only conservatives felt anything over it. They used the day to launch a war with the pretense that it shared responsibility in what happened day. They also used the events of the day to curtail everything the terrorists supposedly hated about us - freedom, openess...

The number of people killed as a result of 9/11 is well over ten times the number that died that day.

And those people had nothing to do with it. Over three thousand Americans dead in wars that have gone nowhere, except for those affiliated with the head of the ruling party.

The US media mourning is incredibly tacky. Let the families and friends mourn their loved ones. Let those that died, lie in peace.

What does it mean to say "never forget"? How will anyone ever forget the day the government would use as an ecuse to commit whatever crime it has since? How can a country forget the day the skyline of its cultural and economic capital was torn apart, leaving behind thousands dead? How can anyone forget the lies and the coverup of the government regarding what they could have done to prevent it and the further suffering by those that stayed behind in the area? How many lives will be cut short due to these health complications from breathing toxic air, the government claimed was safe?

It's time for me to go on though. No, I'm still angry - angry at those that killed thousands, and angry at the way everything has been handled since. But I'm tired. I'm almost numb. This is not being dismissive of the real pain it has caused for the loved ones, for it has...but the nation seemingly has become obsessed with this date...Will we come to expect this sort of ritualizing every five years? And how long can a political party justify its worth over what is ultimately one of their greatest failures?

We can only hope this election is the opposite of '02. What we face now is an opportunity to move on. The nation failed it once two years ago. It has a chance, being at that crossroads again...This time to really show, that it will not be ruled by the tactics of fear...and that we as Americans seek to actually live our lives, rather than cower before authoritarianism (whether from abroad or within).

[fooj]

1. We are Americans.

Note- with hope in your heart- that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can, too. - K. Olbermann

[Lexingtonian]

2. stop being angry, will ya?

I can't figure out why so many people stay stuck on Angry. In the Kubler-Ross grieving process Depression is the next stage, and Acceptance comes sometime after that.

'Never Forget' is something of a riff from the 'Never Again' of Holocaust survivors, but the problem with it is that people who never forget also never forgive and foolishly reject the frail humanity of the Other in favor of living out inhumanity.

Americans have always forgotten the victims of Our Glorious Progress Toward Our Manifest Destiny. Name a single person who got killed in an Indian raid. The retaliation for each such raid was always murderous and barbaric toward innocents, and the slogan was always some variation of 'never forget'. Remember The Alamo. Remember Harper's Ferry. Remember The 'Maine'. Remember The 'Lusitania'. Remember Pearl Harbor. Other than the mythological Davy Crockett, we remember not a single name and rarely even a number of those killed. Once vengeance was had...Americans invariably forgot. Once the slogan had served its purpose of justifying retaliatory evil behavior, the details were erased from collective memory in the name of moral superiority.

I was puzzled by the present phenomenon for quite a long time too, beyond the historical pattern. But now I've come to the conclusion that 'terrorism' is a concept into which the backwards portions of American society have lumped everything they fear about the contemporary world- their xenophobia, their racism, their provincialism, their limited education and experience, their abject fear of Modernity and loss of their share of the disappearing world of white/European predominance and Christian privilege and colonialism and European style agrarianism.

There's a fetishism of terrorism because radical white supremacists and other radical Right Americans secretly feel their relationship to the Modern world is a lot like that of the Al Qaeda sorts. They're fighting to retain or re-create a world of ideals that is obsolete, and they're desperate and ahistorical and cornered into a violent/paranoid lone wolf existence that is reactive and destructive. They feel like aliens and full of dispossession of things they sincerely believe they rightfully own. They live in the wrong period of history, have outlived themselves, are in a sense dead already. But they have now found a reason for living and violence- to fight these terrorists and destroy them. That's who Tim McVeigh was and all of them in some fashion are. Look at FR and tell me I'm wrong.

Politically, 'terrorism' is presently a facade for a fear of Modernity, particularly abhorrence of the painful transition to personal maturity and breadth of understandings it requires, that many people are unable to make.

We are seeing a shift now. People are 'tired of' the perpetual and artificial fear that is used against them. They've run out of convenient targets to lash out at and energy to do so. The defensive arrogance of 2001 is ground down by face-first collisions with reality that reality never loses. Now humility is possible, ignorance proven, weakness manifest. Now the American People is at a stage where maturity- learning and accepting the global situation we are in for what it really is, and discarding the childish mythology of being a Messianic People by birthright surrounded by demon-possessed ones- is beginning to happen on the Right side of the political spectrum.

That, imho, is why those 3,000 people died and what they died for. To revel in selfpity and tribalism and designs of barbarity is exactly the opposite of the lesson involved. But as you can see, the fools who believe more barbarity is the proper response are exceedingly common. The right answer to an act of desecration is not an orgy of retaliatory desecrations. But it's what the idiots of our time fervent believe and act out.