-- Dave Barry
September 12 — Thudfactor
September 12 (Thudfactor)
For six years we have been trying to persevere, to protect what is American, to live our lives like citizens who own their own government. But this administration has spent six years explaining that terrorists changed everything when they flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And that America couldn’t be America any more.
We could not have privacy in public, we could not have privacy in private. We could not have civil rights in airports, we could not have civil rights in court. We would have to watch what we say lest it “embolden” a terrorist. We would have to torture and detain and give up habeus corpus. And people like Jerry Falwell suggested liberals, pagans, and abortionists had to take responsibility for the actions of religious extremists apparently sent by God to punish us for not being righteous enough.
I can understand why people want a moment of silence or two. Why people want to remember friends and loved ones that died that day.
But it is not a holiday for anger. We do not all need to gather to shake our fists and snarl and snipe at people who aren’t being angry and snarly enough and remind people 9/11 changed everything.
In terms of who we are as a country, 9/11 should have changed nothing. We should have taken our American ingenuity and American stubbornness and, with the help of our good friends and allies around the world, fought terrorism like the crime syndicate and disease it is instead of the army that it’s not. And we should have done it without torture, without spying on our own citizens en masse, without sacrificing our most sacred political principles.
We should have persevered, but we didn’t. We let them change us. We let them turn us into something not American. And I don’t want to commemorate September 11 because I already remember September 11. And the damage that was done to us on September 11 is still being done to us now, even now, even six years and a day later…
Amen.
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- 12.09.07 / 12pm
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