Nine Eleven Decade

[innerSpaceman]

Well, we already have the twin towers thread, but this one’s about something more.

What ten years have wrought on this nation and this earth as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, direct or indirect, real or imagined.



I remember being pretty horrified that day, but I don’t recall thinking all too much about the repercussions - except perhaps that someone or other had just unleashed an unfortunate barrelful of WhoopA$$ on the world.

That part has come true in ways so much more deplorable than the events of 9/11 themselves, imo. Ten long years and counting of horrific war. Pfft, we call it “war,” but that demeans the word and makes it worthless. Perhaps not so much do as the “War on Drugs” or even Nine-Eleven’s offspring the “War on Terror.” But to call what America is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan “war” is laughable. War had traditionally meant a series of battles between armed forces, and relatively equally-matched armed forces at that (lest there be but one or two such battles). There are no armed forces fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan against the United States or NATO. What we are doing there is killing brown people. By the hundreds of thousands. Dwarfing anything done by the nefarious plotters of 9/11. And it’s no small comfort to the millions of loved ones to those hundreds of thousands that the ragtag bunch of insurgents and terrorists who can’t possibly form an armed force to rival the U.S. military machine have nonetheless kept it at bay and at battle for 10 years while the effort inexorably bankrupts the United States.

I’m not sure many members of al Queda or even bin Laden considered the primary purpose of the 9/11 attacks to be a nation-crushing economic depletion - but certainly some of the ex-Mujahideen of Afghanistan who formed the core of al Queda understood all too well how the U.S. crushed the Soviet Union through military brinksmanship bankruptcy, and how Russia’s unfortunate occupation of their Afghanistan hastened that bankruptcy in great measure.


But even if this result was inadvertent, it’s happened. 10 years of blood and treasure in amounts unparalleled and unfathomable.

Perhaps 9/11 did not cause any elements that led to this country’s and the world’s current financial crises, but certainly America would be in a better position to deal with the economy of the early 21st Century had it not spent and borrowed for wars in the amount of $3.7 trillion (and counting).




Let’s see, what else? Oh, surely America was doing nasty business all over the world well before 9/11 - but now it’s all in the open, and done with recklessness and presumably-licensed abandon.

Kidnapping and “renditioning” of suspects who would never qualify for a night in a U.S. jail to foreign security forces for state-sanctioned torture. Waterboarding performed by our own people, in contravention of Geneva Convention agreements and all heretofore definitions of torture. Guantanamo. Abu-Graib.

The Patriot Act just recently renewed. Practically all limits on privacy abuse and illegal search and seizure wiped away as if they weren’t constitutionally guaranteed. Blackwater. Halliburton. Weapons of Mass Destruction lied about, never found, foisted for purposes of plunder, pillage and killing hundreds of thousands of brown people.

Predator Drones. Muslim-bashing. Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson/Scooter Libby.

Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. Alberto Gonzales. I could go on and on.


But it makes me sick to do so. As horrifying as the events of 9/11 were, I think what has happened to our nation, and what our nation has foisted on the world, is far more horrifying. It’s been ten years, so I think we’re reaching some sort of equilibrium. But we live in much more of a police state than when we started, and that’s not going away any time soon. Neither is, I guess, perpetual war - or, ya know, killing of brown people.

I don’t like what’s happened since 9/11, much of it in reaction to or capitalizing on 9/11. The crashing of airliners full of people into skyscrapers full of people may just have turned out to be some of the most innocent and harmless parts of the whole sordid, sickening affair.


I certainly never imagined on that day ten years ago that the repercussions would be so terrible or last so long. And I certainly never thought for an instant that day that I was not seeing the worst of it. That so much worse was yet to come.



Personally, I’ve had one of the best decades of my life. I’ve largely been unaffected by any of the awful echoes of nine eleven. But it saddens me so much, as ten years is clicked off, that the events of that day changed our country and our world so much for the worse, and maybe forever.