five years later
September 13th, 2006 by herichon
Most of the 9/11 rememberance stuff has come and gone by now, and every year it seems that the attacks of 9/11 get spun and twisted and distorted a little more. 9/11 and the War on Terror continues to be a rallying cry for the Bush administration, and yet the gap between the true relevance of the events of that day and the increasingly questionable policies for which those events are called to serve as justification continues to grow a little wider each day. Five years ago we entered a long dark night in America, and since then the damage we’ve done to this country all by ourselves – the damage to our unity, our freedoms, our national pride, and our standing in the world – has far outweighed the damage al Qaeda could ever hoped to have cause. We have literally become our own worst enemy.
That night isn’t over yet, and dawn may yet be many years away, but it helps to remember that beyond all of the lies and doublespeak of this administration, there are a few good and true things to come from all this. Despite the continuing misadventures of our inept leadership, there are millions of Americans who did genuinely take 9/11 to heart and learned from it. Though it may not seem like it right now, we really do have the potential to be a stronger and wiser nation now than we were five years ago, if only we can rid ourselves of the cynical self-serving opportunists that have taken residence in Washington.
It seems hard to imagine that anything could ever change, true. But look at it this way – America has always had, and will always have, exactly the kind of government we as Americans deserve. We have an awful incompetent government now because we as citizens have been remiss in our responsibility to elect the right people and to hold them accountable, and because we’ve allowed ourselves to be lulled into complacency and have accepted lies and manipulation in place of truth and effective leadership, over and over again. If we don’t wake up and take steps to change this, then we will continue to get exactly what we deserve from our leaders.
So wake up. Learn the truth. Get involved. Pay attention to what’s happening in Washington and in the rest of the world. Hold your leaders accountable. Vote in good people and vote out bad people. Protest. March. Volunteer. Write letters. Make yourself heard. Make a difference. Make your life count. Things can be better than this – America can be better than this – but nothing will change unless we force that change to happen.
We can’t bring back those 3,000 people that died in September 2001. Neither can we bring back the tens of thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis who’ve suffered and died over the last few years, or the thousands of American soldiers who’ve given their lives in the pursuit of a military strategy that has been – at best – deeply flawed from the beginning. But we – each of us – can best honor their memory by doing everything we can to make this country – and this world – a better place.