A nation of wusses

Three years later and we’re still scared? What’s wrong with this country? Yes, 9/11 was terrible and traumatic, and it’s worth finding out what the U.S. had been doing wrong, and worth even more to do what really can be effective to minimize terrorism against America. But we’ll never do either in a climate of fear.

A substantial part of the population, polls say, are afraid they’ll be killed in a terrorist attack. Despite the fact that they are statistically more in danger of being killed by falling down the stairs while talking on a cell phone. Around 3,000 people died tragic deaths three years ago, and in the three years since, more than 10 times that many died each year of cancer from smoking and bad stuff in our air. Five times as many people die each year because they don’t have health insurance.

Your life is more in danger in New York City crossing the street or taking a taxi than from a repeat of 9/11. Do you live in fear of getting behind the wheel of your car?

Instead, we’ve had exactly one incompetent guy tried to light explosives in his shoe, and now tens of thousands of people every day stand in line like sheep to take off their shoes for inspection before being granted the privilege of inhaling stale air and not getting a bad meal in a cramped airliner seat. We must be grateful that nobody tried to light their shorts.

Now any one of us can be pulled away from the airport counter, hustled to a room and questioned like people caught stealing Bush’s remedial reader from the White House bathroom, because of a bad joke, the attempted smuggling aboard of a dangerous nailclipper, or maybe a foreign-sounding accent, or just as likely for no reason at all---because a name sort of matches a name on a list compiled by---well, nobody knows who compiled it, or why names are put on it, and certainly how to get names off when there’s a mistake. And like sheep we just let this go on. Why? Because we’re wusses.

We have a lot of help. The GOPers keep it alive but the New York and Washington based media does, too. Some of that is understandable---they knew people in the rubble, they were nearby---but those images can't be bad for ratings either. By now the actual events of that day are long lost in what has come to adhere to the images of it, as our parrotheads and other leaders repeatedly tell us what to think about it. Or more properly what to feel.

The people of London and other cities in England during the Blitz endured a 9/11 nearly every day for years, and apparently with a great deal more grace. If you want some justified fear, try getting sick without having health insurance, or losing your second job that’s the difference between paying the rent that means your kid has a place to live so she can go to school and gets at least one hot meal a day.

It’s not just that it’s unseemly to be so chicken-hearted. It’s dangerous, because fear clouds the mind. You think with your glands and do what seems the fastest and easiest to avoid danger. If you’re right, you escape. If you’re wrong, you perish. If the panic echo of 9/11, kept alive by the fear-mongering GOPers, leads America to retain the destructive services of G.W. Bush because he offers a simplistic analysis and simple solutions which also happen to be worse than dead wrong, we will perish as a free and prosperous people, and we’ll take the future with us.

Certainly terrorism is an important threat, now and even more so in the future, to the stability of our society. But fear of terrorism, and the manipulation of that fear by the Bushies, has already done more damage to America, to freedom here and to American standing in the world, than terrorists could dream of. And it’s done too little to stop terrorism now, and has worked against stopping terrorism in the near future.

Bush keeps to his steady course, which we’re supposed to admire as he heads us crashing into the iceberg that’s been clearly visible for months.

It’s 9/11, do you know where your Homeland Security is? Off making deals with huge corporations run by GOPer donors for expensive technologies of dubious usefulness, while there’s not enough money left for police to patrol borders or the streets, ports to inspect cargo ships or air freight, or fire and rescue to respond if something happens.

Meanwhile a select few Americans keep getting richer, keep getting more gravy in tax cuts, while the bottom falls out for most everyone else, and the rich-run media projects these images of wealth to the 9/11th of the world that’s indelibly poor if not outright starving and suffering through lives we can barely imagine. But some of the people in those exploited and usually invisible countries have figured out that vastly destructive power comes in very small packages, and that technology can be turned against those who have it.

But of course terrorism can’t be springing from that. Those terrorists are the embodiment of Evil, they were obviously born that way. They Hate Us, and Our Way of Life. They want to Take Away Our Freedom. They are swarthy and speak ugly guttural languages, they have religions of Hate not Love (and so we must kill them) and are really aliens from the godless planet of Hell.

Face to face with someone out to kill you, you defend yourself and those around you. Soldiers know this, and soldiers who have operated well and honorably under fire have the skills necessary for such defense. And sometimes you attack the enemy before the enemy can attack you, assuming you are real certain of the enemy, and its ability and intent to attack you. If not, everyone in the world is potentially an enemy. Fear becomes what we call paranoia, which politically is expressed as institutionalized fear, as a massive cult of fear.

9/11 remains vivid, and Americans (some pollsters say) are bored with Iraq, they’d rather let George II do it (so sure of his right to rule even as a young fool that he could contemtuously blow off even the safe duty he drew thanks to his family connections, while the kind of people he is sending to die, maim and be mained in Iraq were sent to die, maim and be mained in Vietnam) and watch Donald Trump purse his lips and say those immortal witty words, “you’re fired.” More than a thousand American soldiers have died in Iraq, with 8 or 10 thousand more wounded, there and in the region, and nobody seems to know---or for that matter care--- how many Iraqis. But that's over there, in Hell. Call me when Baghdad Disneyland opens.

Iraq may hold together until November 2, but nobody credible in the world believes it will be a beacon of democracy any time soon, and most are pretty sure the current government will fall and civil war will ensue. After November, we can expect Shock and Awe bombing as we’ve never seen, and we’ve at least heard of some before. After that, the necons will be loose, and the reality of not enough money coming in or armed forces stretched too thin, won’t impress them any more than it has already. Look out world, you haven’t seen WMD like you’re going to once GW is reelected. Saddam was wishing for nukes, but North Korea and Iran are doing more than wishing…

If this election rides on the fear engendered by 9/11 the chances are 9 out of 11 that our fear will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Put back in office the man who most voters voted against last time, and it will then be time to be afraid. To be very afraid.