We’re in the midst of a rolling tragedy that has dwarfed what happened on 9/11/2001. The pandemic has killed hundreds of times more Americans than the 9/11 terrorists did - with some help, of course, from a treasonous fifth column in our country that’s actively sided with the damned virus, and opposed all measures to limit its spread. But I digress.
In my small town, the bells are going to ring out at the times when each of the four airplanes crashed twenty years ago. Well, fuck that. Last winter, we had a whole month where we were losing a 9/11 per day to the plague. According to Worldometer, from January 8th to February 7th, 2021, the 7-day rolling average was up over 3000 deaths per day. For the next 20 years, are the bells going to ring out on every one of those days? I doubt it. Damned if I know why one thing is worse than the other - especially when the other is going on right fucking now. It’s just hard to give a flying fuck about a much smaller disaster that happened a generation ago.
Imagine that some disaster had killed 3000 Americans in 1923. Would we have stopped everything for memorial observances of that event in 1943, in the middle of WWII? Of course not.
And of course, the Shrub Administration used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse for much greater carnage. Hundreds of thousands died in Iraq as a result of our invasion, and millions became refugees. Hell, even in Afghanistan, I recently read that we killed over 20,000 Afghani civilians over the length of our involvement there. Those fucking idiots thought they could do the Middle East as if it was nothing more than a game of Risk, and the result was death on a far greater scale than that which was inflicted on us.
Memorialize them. Have a day where we hang our heads in shame for all the times we’ve thought we could fix things through war in some part of the world we didn’t understand in the least. That would be a good thing: an exercise in national humility and recognition of our limits.
And then maybe do something about that pro-Covid fifth column.
I still think 9/11 was a tragedy and the victims deserve to be remembered. But I fully agree with you that Americans learned the wrong lessons from that event.
In a lot of ways, Osama Bin Laden may have lost his life, and may have lost most of the battles, but he won the war. He baited the United States into the Middle East, and the attacks changed the character of our country, probably forever. Our society has become more corrupt, authoritarian, and exclusive.
I hate 9/11 observances. I think they’re masturbatory exercises in recreational grief and declarations of perpetual victimhood.
We dishonored the dead by entering two needless wars, bankrupting the nation, destabilizing the middle east, and killing thousands of innocents. We’ve given people license to hate others that may pray differently than they do. This rebirth of xenophobia led to a culture that eventually gave us a fascist in the White House. People say “never forget”. What the fuck does that mean? For too many, it means hating the “other” in perpetuity. We’d honor the dead of 9/11 one hell of a lot more by forgetting it ever happened.
9/11 was a stupid remembrance in 2002, in 2021 its fucking retarded. In 2001, the #1 cause of death for the week of 9/11 was tobacco use. It has always just been a mastabatory exercise for New Yorkers and their supporters that we have destroyed our society for.
Isn’t it something that the war we engaged in after September 11th is the war that we are just now leaving? (Well, we started a war in Iraq first thing after September 11, against people that had nothing to do with it, because fuck us, but I digress.)
I think I can grieve more than one thing at once. I can grieve the day America changed. I can grieve the horrifying scenes I witnessed on tv that day. AND I can grieve the loss of many thousands to Covid.
There are two 20 year commemorations that I cannot avoid and are equally “mastubatory.exercises.” 911 and the anniversary of the Diamondbacks winning the World Series. Every game broadcast has to have some reminder, some pointless mention. Come on guys, there have been 19 different World Series since. You’re not that special.
And frankly, neither is NY. When 3000 people a day are dying from covid, just STFU already.
And while we’re at it, can we get over Pearl Harbor already?
I thought this was going to be a rant about NBC’s unnecessary commentary (did they learn nothing from the complaints during the Olympics?) and ad breaks (!) during the reading of the names in New York.
The ceremonies seem to be thoughtfully planned. 9/11 and its fallout have been unnecessarily politicized; maybe the country needs to be reminded that it’s still a very real, raw tragedy for lots of people.
I don’t really agree. America changed on this date, sometimes in bad ways, but it happened and good people lost their lives. They deserve to be remembered.
But in ways that matter. Why were first responders who suffered high levels of cancer denied their right to benefits for so many years? Why did they need a Jon Stewart to help them?
Many of the changes that happened may have come about in any case. They should be addressed with a minimum of lobbying and a high degree of pragmatism. But this does not make memorials mainly masturbatory mirages merely minimizing modern military monotheism. Mmmkay?
I guess I grieve that we changed, I remember listening to NPR that day and hearing the announcer saying words to the effect that now everything has changed, and thinking to myself that he was being hyperbolic. He was right and I was wrong, but we would have been much better off if the reverse was true.
We should have come together as a nation, to mourn our loss, in the same way we might mourn a catastrophic earthquake, graciously accepted the condolences from those around the world. Investigate what went wrong to prevent it happening in the future and then get on with our lives. Instead in a strange combination of Rambo and chicken little we lost our collective minds as a nation. Marched ourselves several steps forward towards a police state. Traded civil rights for security theater, and squandered all of the international solidarity that 9/11 had given us on two useless wars, and basically gave Bin Laden everything he wanted out of the attack.
9/11 was the JonBenét Ramsey of national tragedies. It was sad an tragic, but not worth the media hype it received.
This is my take, also. For people who lost loved ones, who worked during the rescue, who have suffered long-term effects… clearly they want and need an observance.
BUT in the last year and a half we have lost the equivalent of the number of people killed on 9/11 every day for ~220 days (so far). Why hasn’t that sunk in?
The events of 9/11 caught the country by surprise (this is not the place to debate that). But COVID deaths are 9/11 death numbers every day in slow motion and mostly preventable! And there will be more! Many more thousands of people are going to die because of sheer stupidity.
Look at all the “safety measures” that were quickly locked into place after 9/11, forever ruining the pleasure of airplane travel. But we can’t get people to take a vaccine and wear a fucking mask. And people are dying every day because we can’t.
All of this is so nuts that it makes my head explode.