Today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The sky is as blue as it was that morning, the sun is shining as brightly, and there’s a nice breeze passing by that portends the arrival of fall. I was 33 years old on 9/11. Now I’m 53. 33 feels like a lifetime ago. 9/11 feels like a lifetime ago. How much has changed in me in 20 years. My hair, my financial status, my outlook on life, and my view of the day itself. A marriage, birth, divorce, and the death of my father happened in that time.
I could reminisce and describe where I was that day and everything that followed in the weeks after, extrapolate on the bullet points of being woken up by my sister’s 4th phone call after the second plane hit, watching the replay of a passenger airplane hitting the second tower on a summer day with crystal clear visibility; walking to work across town in a complete daze because the subways were shut down, and looking down 6th Avenue from 59th Street to see the Twin Towers billowing black smoke–the last time I would ever see them standing, even though I didn’t know it at the time; getting to work and being told by my assistant that the Towers had fallen in the 15 minutes between the time I saw them and the time I arrived at the Lipstick Building; the surreal mental hysteria of the day (was another attack coming? when, where, who? the Pentagon was just hit! the fucking Pentagon! holy fuck, what’s next?), the nausea and PTSD that ensued; post 9/11 subway rides where I didn’t know if I’d survive because a terrorist attack on a subway is so fucking easy to do but I didn’t care because I wasn’t going to let the terrorists win and this was my small act of daily Fuck You defiance; my mother and sister freaking out because they were in Italy and couldn’t reach me or my youngest sister who lived in Queens; Manhattan being cut off from the rest of NYC, truly an island for the first time since I’d lived there; recurrent dreams of a nuclear bomb dropping on New York; weeks and weeks and weeks of nightly news reports of volunteers and video of first responders digging through rubble that looked as big, vast, broken, and ugly as a dystopian planet, something out of a Terminator movie; the incredible, irrational, deep-seated paranoia that the brown-skinned waiter serving me at my local diner was an Al Qaeda “sleeper” who was going to poison my food; trying to get some normalcy in October by going out to eat at night on the Upper West Side, only to smell the acrid smoke and chemicals wafting up from the graveyard downtown, a smell that did not disappear until the following year. It smelled like death. The rest of that year smelled like death. I was surrounded by death. Tragic story after tragic story about the people who died, including a woman I knew from college who was on one of the planes.
I could dig deep into any one of those things if I wanted to. I have done it before. But I don’t want to any more. For three years I watched the annual remembrances religiously. The reading of the names. The bell ringing. The incessant news coverage. I felt like it was my duty to honor the deceased. It was the least I could do. Sometime after that I stopped, because I finally became honest with myself: I didn’t want to annually revisit all of the misery and sadness of that day. It didn’t suit any purpose. And then on some level, as more years passed, the whole thing began to strike me as over-the-top and even hypocritical. How many similar national tragedies did we not mourn in a similar way? None of them that I could remember. It’s true that the 9/11 attack was shocking, horrible, and an attack that this country had never experienced in modern times (Pearl Harbor was a world away, decades ago, in a small state, and it mostly impacted our military, not civilians). And this is not to minimize the devastation suffered by people who lost loved ones and the bravery of first responders that day. For those people and their families, 9/11 will forever be the biggest event of their lives, and so it would be with me if I lost someone that day.
But I didn’t lose someone that day, and the more that time passed and continues to pass, the more perspective I have on that day and everything that came after. If you had asked me on 9/12/01 whether, 20 years later, I’d feel the way I do now, I’d say you were crazy. 20 years ago, I was a mess emotionally, in shock, and also really fucking angry. Like most Americans, I was furious and wanted revenge. I wanted Bin Laden’s head on a pike. I wanted every terrorist who was responsible to have a bomb dropped on their head with no remains to bury. I fully supported the invasion of Afghanistan. It was self-defense. You punched us in the face, so we need to punch you back harder, or it will happen again. (Kind of Trumpian-sounding now, no?) We absolutely needed to stop this attack from happening again because there was no justification for what they did, intentionally attacking and killing civilians who were simply going about their daily lives. These were not legitimate targets in a war. We had to hit back hard.
20 years later….
20 years later, where are we? 20 years later, I have the benefit of hindsight and perspective, because I know everything that came after 9/11. Our over-reaction, and the death and destruction we unleashed on the world. Bush’s inexplicable and absolutely stupid decision to invade Iraq instead of focusing on Al Qaeda. The mission creep that ensued in Afghanistan: we went from a goal of eliminating Al Qaeda’s ability to attack the United States, even killing Bin Laden who was hiding in FUCKING PAKISTAN (a country that is the real problem here, in my opinion, along with Saudi Arabia), a stone’s throw away from where the Pakistani secret service is housed (go figure), to trying to build a democracy in a country that has spit out more imperialist occupiers in history than any other country I can think of, short of Vietnam.
What else did we do? We killed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. We killed men, women, and countless children. Hundreds of them. Killing civilians in a war is the same thing that Al Qaeda did, right? It’s a war crime. Now did we do it intentionally like Al Qaeda did? Did we say: “Let’s kill some civilians to teach these people a lesson”? Not every time, but sometimes we absolutely did. Sometimes we intentionally targeted the people we killed and killed the people we were aiming for because we thought they were terrorists, only to find out they weren’t. Oh well! Sometimes we intentionally targeted the people we killed and killed them, along with dozens of other people, innocent men, women, and children that we knew were going to die ahead of time, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we needed to kill a “high value target,” or even a low value one. We subsequently referred to those dead civilians as “collateral damage.” Nice euphemism for dead kids. We just killed another 10 of them, including 7 children, a couple of weeks ago, in Afghanistan. We thought they were ISIS. Oh well! Sorry about those dead kids! Barely reported in our media. No one cares.
I began to ask myself: Isn’t this, collateral damage, acceptable civilian deaths in war, the same logic Al Qaeda used on 9/11, except on a much bigger scale? Yes. Yes, it is.
We killed Afghan and Iraqi civilians with our high flying drones, targeting them from thousands of miles away, with a computer in a conference room located in Colorado or Virginia, as if it were a Playstation video game. We massacred entire wedding parties. Repeatedly. No terrorists present. We leveled houses killing entire families. No terrorists present. We killed innocent people on the ground too. I could post article after article of war crimes committed by our soldiers in our name. In Haditha, for example. Google it. The torture of Abu Gharaib. The ongoing violation of the Geneva Convention that is Guantanamo, where we continue to hold people based on zero evidence that they did anything, just because we can. Water-boarding of terrorists that the Bush Administration deemed perfectly fine and not a war crime, which subsequent investigations determined gleaned us nothing. Torture doesn’t work, people. How many terrorists did we create with our ill-advised, myopic, endless wars and foreign policy over the past 20 years? A fuckload.
What else happened? Instead of covering the outrages committed by our people and our country, American media either glossed over it or ignored it entirely. None of the dead Iraqis and Afghans we killed, or the hundreds of thousands of massacred civilians that resulted from the two wars we started got 9/11 remembrances, pictures of loved ones on television year after year, personal profiles on CNN and Fox News. Jesus, Trump just exonerated a war criminal, Edward Gallagher, who was reported by fellow Navy SEALS (to their immense credit) for killing innocent people, including sniping innocent civilians in Iraq. American mainstream media really showed its ass the past 20 years. Totally biased, totally pro war, as most recently demonstrated by the ridiculous, histrionic coverage of our long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan. With rare and limited exception, real journalism does not exist in this country. Our MSM is run by eight corporations and beholden to advertising dollars, and it shows.
No one fucking cares about dead people in other countries. We only care about dead Americans.
Or do we? If the past year and a half of COVID has taught us anything, it’s that American concern about the public good and our fellow neighbor is a dying sentiment in this country. 675,000 Americans have died from COVID, almost 2/3 of a million people. This is an unfathomable number. How many 9/11s is that? I don’t know, but it’s a lot of 9/11s. One would think we would have united as a country and gotten on the same page to fight COVID a year and a half ago, just like we did after 9/11 and during WWII. But apparently, uniting to drop bombs on brown people and Nazis is a lot easier than uniting to fight an invisible, highly contagious disease, particularly in this social media age. Two-thirds of Americans pretty much did what was required, even though some of them did it reluctantly, bitching the entire time (“Hey, I’m just ‘asking questions’ here!“). The other third? They said “Fuck You.” They said “Me First.” They said “I won’t mask, I won’t vaccinate, Fuck You.” They acted like toddlers whose favorite toy was being taken away. They farted out slogans about their “freedom” while shitting on the freedom of everyone else to not get sick and die from COVID, and have normalcy return to this country before the year 2030. They marched on state capital buildings housing governors who were desperately trying to get a handle on outbreaks in their states. They screamed at flight attendants who were just doing their jobs because they didn’t want to mask, or thought that wearing their mask underneath their nose was sufficient. They appeared at grocery stores with video cameras playing, giving shit to, and even assaulting, other masked customers and employees who were fucking heroes for risking their lives and going to work when the pandemic was at its peak, just so we could buy food and other things that we needed. Those selfish. fucking. assholes. were urged on and continuously misinformed by grifting disinformation peddlers on Fox News, Newsmaxx, OANN, and YouTube, and Republican politicians who know better, who are vaxxed themselves, but who see a personal power benefit in misleading people. FUCK ALL OF THEM HARD.
And on January 6th, we saw a bunch of armed, mostly white, Trump-supporting, domestic terrorists break into our Capitol Building like a bunch of KKK torch-carrying goons from the 1950s because they didn’t like that their fascist criminal of a candidate lost by 7 million votes and got trounced in the Electoral College. Egged on by the man himself, who watched and smiled from a safe distance and did nothing to stop them until Kevin McCarthy begged him to.
Even Al Qaeda didn’t do that. Even Vladdy Vladdy Poot Poot and China didn’t do that. Even ISIS didn’t do that. Those anti-democratic, POS, domestic terrorists came close to taking members of Congress hostage (or worse) and disrupting our democratic process just so they could keep their Orange MAGA Fuckstick in office, like the banana republic wannabe dictator he is.
All of this is a national disgrace. One-third of Americans have utterly disgraced themselves and this country, to the point that 20 years after 9/11, I am far more concerned about this group of Americans and how they are taking this country down than I ever was about Al Qaeda. This shit is still happening, and we have not seen the worst of it. I guarantee you there are plenty more Tim McVeighs out there who have yet to speak. They are the true national security threat, there are way more of them than I thought, and they are far from done.
20 years later… The death we imposed on Afghanistan, Iraq for nearly two decades, the incredible selfishness, lack of empathy and care demonstrated by so many people in this country in the face of a pandemic that on many days (224 of them, I’m told) killed as many Americans in one day as 9/11 did, and the armed assault on our Congress by fellow Americans, has made it almost impossible for me to emotionally connect to the horrible events of 20 years ago. So much bad, and arguably (I’d say definitely) worse, has happened since, that all of the tributes and “This is where I was that day and this is how I felts” ring completely hollow. Apart from people who were personally impacted by losing people or trying to rescue people, or who dug through toxic rubble, and who are now sick or who died as a result of their exposure (without getting the medical help they needed from those “patriots” in power), the expressions of remembrance feel like a disingenuous Hallmark card to me.
20 years later, I’ve discovered that the real terrorist problem is homegrown. The real terrorist problem is here. The real I don’t give a fuck about anyone else but myself problem is us. 20 years later, it’s time to look in the fucking mirror and take the log out of our own eye first, before we decide to drop bombs again on someone else.
