[Insensitive] A Screed Against 9/11

[digitaldiscipline]

Five years out, the terrorists have won.

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Americans are herded like cattle through metal detectors, screened within a hairsbreadth of the Fourth Amendment, have phone calls surreptitiously and illegally eavesdropped upon, watch soldiers die, watch money flood in a torrent from where it's needed to where it's wasted.

Today, we live in a country of institutionalized fear, and that fear, nay, that terror, is propagated not by violent, jihadist, freedom-hating fundamentalist ideologues (the Muslim ones, not the Christian ones, though the latter are certainly aiding the cause unintentionally or otherwise), but is instead spread, both blatantly and insidiously, from the bully pulpit of our own elected officials.

Five years out, we are a country under seige to "remember the lessons of 9/11" by people who ignored warnings both subtle and overt, who could have acted when it mattered to prevent what happened. These people have not learned the lessons they give the most callous lip service to.

And today, five years out, we are a nation under seige to remember what happened, rather than move on and heal.

Living in the shadow of fear, leaping at the smallest noise or hint of threat... that's not freedom.

I am sick to the fucking tits of "rememberances" and "retrospectives" and slickly-produced documentaries (slanted to one side or the other, or without any bias whatsoever), because all they serve to do is remind me of how much we have lost and how little we have gained.

We are not safer. We are less free.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

We have not found Osama Bin Fucking Laden. Some contend that competent leadership could have done so in places like Tora Bora. I will be the last person to call our country's leadership competent. The fact remains that the shit that walks like a man behind what happened is still wasting as much of my oxygen as George W. Bush.

9/11 was the day the internet grew up, and a political figure became the #1 search term on Yahoo and Google instead of the latest pretty person or trifle.

I understand that people cope with trauma in different ways. Mine happens to be telling people who enjoy wallowing in sentimentality or going into a neurotic shell when presented with anything on the subject to get the fuck over it. I'm being assaulted by gravitas-laden montages of "God Bless the USA" intercut with GWB sound bites from the pro-armed forces radio station playing too loudly in my coworker's cubicle, and it's all I can do to avoid throwing the goddamned thing out the window because I'm sick of the blind and smirking propaganda that has suffused every mention of the date.

Our leaders trot it out to keep us afraid to think, to keep us afraid to act, to keep us believing that they know what's best, when it's patently obvious that they don't, haven't, and refuse to.

We have always been at war with Oceana.

I have always been at war with stupidity. And I think the national fixation with wallowing in remembrance has crossed the line. We don't work ourselves into a catatonic lather over Pearl Harbor Day anymore. We don't grind to a halt on the anniversary of JFK's assassination. We don't fret incessantly on the days leading up to when either Space Shuttle blew up.

Get over it. Live.

The emotional weight oppressing and crushing our national psyche is propaganda in the purest, most insidious sense.

Fuck that noise.

I refuse to be a victim of terrorists, or my government, or the propaganda machine that serves them both. Nobody dictates my thoughts or emotions without my consent. Don't let them dictate yours.

Today sucks because it's a Monday, and that's all.