2027 9-11

The last thing they saw from the air

Have we made the world a better place since 9/11/01?  No.  It’s just that the slow dissolution we like to think started then is less visible.

After all, “very good people” wearing swastikas or brandishing racist flags don’t bring down whole buildings in a single strike.  They just disparage and dispirit us in small groups. People in charge of legislation always have substituted hot air for substance. And still, they do. But we have become less susceptible to it. 

We seem not to have a large group of brilliantly plotting terrorists on our shores -- at least any we are able to identify.  Now we have bedbugs of human beings, cockroaches, deer ticks who are taking us down one at a time and we don’t always recognize it.

We elect madmen to high office.  We oppose them with other madmen.  All the while, we pretend everything’s just fine.  Rome isn’t burning. It’s rotting.

9/11 is floating into history now except for the few people directly affected.  Like the friends and loved ones of the victims, the still-hospitalized first responders and the cuckoo clock Giuliani. Oh and the latecomers who want to own it.

It’s like D-Day or Armistice Day.  It’s like the landing of the Mayflower. Or Haym Solomon’s birthday.  It’s already in the American history textbooks, even the ones approved by the Texas Board of Education, which whitewashes everything. 

And did we learn anything from the events of and immediately after that day 18 years ago? Sure.

We learned that it’s perfectly fine to place closed circuit cameras everywhere.  Not “virtually” anywhere. Not “almost” anywhere. Actually anywhere. Orwell wouldn’t be proud. He would be relieved that his predictions in “1984” were just mistimed and not inaccurate.

We have learned to distrust Muslims.  We have learned to embrace conspiracy theories about everything.  It’s not just JFK and the moon landing anymore. The paranoid state is today’s iteration of this country and much of the rest of the world.

We have devalued the concept represented by the word “terrorism” by applying it to events that may frighten, but don’t terrorize. We have learned to sleep with one eye open. We have learned to watch our backs in areas and circumstances that never before warranted watching.

“Homeland Security” is an excuse to track your phone calls, your snail mail, your email and the websites you visit. It’s something to wave in front of a sheepesque public allowing TSA agents to grope you at the airport.  No backpacks in the stadium. Open your packages.  Random luggage searches.

And we have simultaneously become both oversensitive and desensitized. 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Comments?  Send ‘em here: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019