Common Sense

I wanted to write something beautiful and poignant about the 6th anniversary of the tragedy, but I don’t have the time or the inclination.

In truth, I’m still as angry and confused about that day as I was standing in the counselors’ office at MCC watching the events unfold live. I was livid that it was happening, and as we all learned more about exactly what happened that day, my anger has only grown.

When now head of the State Dept. Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission, I watched and grew more angry about that day. ” I believe it was titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US’,” my God, what more do you need to open your eyes?! Only a complete moron would look at that Aug. 6 PDB and say none of it was actionable or that it wasn’t important.

When I finally saw what our president did for 7 minutes after COS Andy Card whispered into his ear that “America was under attack,” I grew even more incensed. He said later that he sat there to ‘project calm’ but looking at that picture, I don’t see calm. I see utter fear. I see about as much calm as a deer has when an 18-wheeler is barrelling down on it in the dead of night. George W. Bush has spent his entire presidency, from standing on the rubble of Ground Zero days later talking tough into a bullhorn to his aircraft landing/codpiece incident to project strength. What we saw when it really counted, when America needed a leader most, was him just sitting there ready to piss his pants in fear.

All this anger, I’ve got no where to channel it other than to try and write and undermine all the things he’s done since that day. Everything from his gleeful attempts to use 9/11 to justify our involvement in Iraq to actually accusing those of us who point out his stupidity as being the ones who are afraid.

Other people, trying to find an outlet for all this anger have turned to conspiracy theories about “what really happened” that day. If you Google 9-11 conspiracy, you get plenty of results. Popular Mechanics did a good job of debunking everything the conspiracy theorists have put out there, and that’s an important job.

That anger needs to be channeled somewhere other than perpetuating false theories and accusations and building up the messiah complexes of the leaders of this “truth movement.” They are just as bad when it comes to being the one who knows the truth as the man we all agree seems to always be wrong when he claims to be right: President George W. Bush.

Until we can channel that anger and do some good with it, we can never really begin to accept and to mourn those who died that day. We can say “We Will Never Forget,” but those with the power to do so have already made us forget, for their own advantage, what happened that day. They made us forget by using a national tragedy as a partisan tool; as odious a thing as I have ever seen. And all that leads to is more anger.

Anger is merely a step in the grief process. So long as people keep using this day to meet their own ends; to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate what this tragedy really means to us as a nation in our history, we can never really reach acceptance. And we have to accept what happened if we are ever to stop grieving and do something to prevent another great tragedy.