Remembering 9/11

20 years ago tomorrow, a terrorist attack in the United States country was the worst single crime against humanity of the new century.

Up until that point.

For a brief moment, Americans were one people, in shock, in grief, but together. The cruel attacks united us in a way that hasn't been seen since.

This hasn't been seen since because of what happened next.

The unity was cynically exploited by politicians and their sponsors to engage in an avalanche of inhumanity.

Two destructive wars that cost billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, both American and foreign. 

State-sponsored kidnapping. 

State-sponsored torture. 

Inciting bigotry against honest, hard-working Americans. 

So much pain inflicted.

In our name.

And worse still, encouraging "allies" to join in.

We are not safer because of this avalanche of inhumanity. 

And we are certainly not more united because of this avalanche of inhumanity.

The internal unraveling of America succeeded more spectacularly than the 9/11 terrorists could possibly have imagined. The mass murder was done by foreigners but the subsequent disintegration was entirely self-inflicted.

Bigotry always does as much damage those holding such views as it does to the objects of the hatred. This is true of individuals. And as the last two decades have shown, it is also true of societies.

Fires are only extinguished when they are deprived of the oxygen they need to survive. The fire of  division is nourished by the oxygen of bigotry. It's long past time to starve that fire.

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

-From South Pacific, Rodgers & Hammerstein

Let's get rid of E Pluribus Unum as our national motto

I read this story in The Guardian about how Parkland massacre survivors have been attacked with hoaxes and smears.

To me, this is not really about the smearing of those kids (although I personally feel sorry for them that they have to endure this garbage after what else they've had to endure).

 

I am more broadly disturbed by the extent to which toxic hate propaganda - often outright lies but always malicious - has taken over our public discourse.

 

To use this example, criticize what these kids are saying and proposing. Sure, that's fair game. No one is exempt from that.

 

But to circulate malicious lies like how one of them allegedly tore up a copy of the Constitution - she did not - is downright evil. It's evil because it's sole purpose is to sow hatred and division.

 

People who support any form of gun control are not Nazis. People who own guns are not murderers. Neither group is homogeneous enough for such labels. And it's hardly just this one issue where such poison is flooding society. It's all of them.

 

I've read somewhat extensively about the Holocaust, Rwanda and other 20th century genocides and they all - WITHOUT EXCEPTION - started not with physical violence but with a rigorous and systematic hate campaign designed to demonize whichever group was being targeted. Once these groups were dehumanized with words, it became much easier to commit atrocities against them with actions.

 

The level of toxicity is becoming poisonous. You can be passionate and provocative without being hateful. It is truly threatening our country. We have always been a violent society, even in the best of times. There is no reason to think that, if left unchecked, this will end well.

 

If we consider ourselves a civilized nation, let's act like it. If we consider ourselves a Christian nation, let's act like it.

We've met the enemy and it is us

For all the money this country has spent supposedly to fight Islamist terrorism, the real enemy is ourselves. A story in The Atlantic  notes that since 9/11/2001, over 334,000 Americans have been killed by guns used by other Americans. So in that time period, 100 Americans have been killed by a fellow American for every 1 America killed by an Islamist terrorist. So maybe we should drop the canned talking points about how we need more gun control or how every child should be given a gun upon entering elementary school. And maybe we should talk more about how we can become a more civilized, less barbaric nation. Every nation has murderers, psychopaths and crazy people, but proportionally, our culture seems to produce a lot more of them proportionally. Let's look in the mirror.

Not quite getting the concept

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


Kanye West, Serena Williams, Congressman Liar, anti-health care reform mobs, screaming replacing intelligent debate... when Marx wrote of a "classless society," I'm pretty sure this isn't what he meant.