I remember 9/11

It was a Tuesday. Me and The Missus had just the weekend before moved the whole dog and pony show to this miserable little island. Her Dad paddled over with us and helped with the load-out. It was crazy hot, even for early September.

As usual I’m up before 7 local time (10 on the east coast) and turn on the morning news – how hot is it supposed to get today? Instead, I got grainy rabbit-eared footage of the twin towers burning. I ran immediately in and woke up The Missus. “You’re not gonna believe this shit” I told her. And like the rest of the country, we sat there and watched the towers fall a little while later.

I remember being really really pissed – pissed that we didn’t have our cable hooked up yet and my computer was still in a box somewhere. The biggest news event certainly of the decade and I was forced to squint at it on rabbit-ear TV.

It was horrible.

I was the first person in the complex to hang an American flag outside our apartment that day. I couldn’t find my computer, but I knew just where my flag was.

After the human tragedy of it had had its way with us, I remember thinking, “This country is about to go screaming to the right.” Dumbleyou had just recently won his squeaker of an election in the Supreme Court due to the country being on a bubble – we were primed to be knocked one way or another. I didn’t mind the idea of getting all medieval on whatever evil fuckers had done this thing – we’d have to, if only so we wouldn’t be seen as the world’s bitch from that point on. Some kind of Extreme Sanction was absolutely necessary and called for. What worried me then is the same thing that worries me now – who stewards us through this rough patch of history?

Aye, there’s the rub.

Remember the outpouring of support that came our way in the aftermath of 9/11? If the Bush administration had been more interested in coalition-building than cowboy dick-swinging, we might still have the rest of the world on our side instead of at our throats. I think it was the President of France, of all people, who said at the time, “Today, we are all Americans.”

And they were. Even some moderate Muslim governments denounced the September 11 attacks and offered statements of support.

It was that kind of moment in time, and we squandered it.

Our leaders pissed it away, because it didn’t fit in with their world-view, or their agenda, which from Day One had been all about punishing Saddam for making W’s daddy look like a pussy back in the Gulf War. Suddenly, the perfect pretext drops in their lap. “Mission Accomplished” is just around the corner.

And I keep thinking, Good God, what a waste. Think what TR could have done with an opportunity like 9/11 afforded us. Think what a statesman could have built from that wellspring of international good will… then turn on the news any night and see from Iraq what our leaders have wrought instead.

It’s like one of those nightmare alternate-future scenarios in the cheap sci-fi I favor. How the hell did we get from point A (worldwide bonhomie) to point B (some concluding chapter in the book of Revelations)?

The victims of 9/11 deserve better, and so do we.