Enough, Enough, Enough, Enough

I come not to praise 9/11; I come to bury it. For as horrible as that day was, practically everything that has happened since has only made the day worse. Thousands died in the most shocking way and since then thousands more have died in one of humanity’s most ordinary ways—sheer stupidity and over-reaching hubris. That’s the human cost. Then there’s the cost to our Constitution, the cost to our hope. As someone who is deeply proud to be American—if so very often I am deeply ashamed by what might country does in my name—I see all of that as human cost, too.

I refuse to fight terror as I refuse to wage war on a feeling. Look, I can be as frightened as the next person, maybe more so. If I didn’t have my own mass of fears I might be the writer I should be, the activist I needed to be, and not some poor fool 9-5ing and pecking away at a pitiful blog. But the whole point of having a country is there’s strength in numbers. And the whole point of having an America is those strong numbers believe in something, and it sure as hell isn’t “let’s get them before they get us, even if they don’t want to get us…and why is it all of a sudden everybody wants to get us?”

So while too much of the rest country “honors” 9/11, I prefer to remember other days, of equally somber seasons, one of the many when things turned wrong. I might opt for 12/11, the day the Supreme Court picked George W. Bush to be president. Or 1/17, the day W. took over as Texas governor and thereby got a foothold into politics after failing at everything else he’s done. Or 12/25, not to celebrate Christmas, but to remember the day the Soviet Union rolled into Afghanistan, thereby helping lead to the Afghan resistance and the glorification of one Osama Bin Laden. Or 8/19, the day the U.S. and the Brits kicked out Mossadegh from Iran so the oil fields wouldn’t be nationalized. Or maybe 10/11, the day Gertrude Bell got re-posted in Baghdad in 1920 and she then decided on a map that roped together the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis, leaving us all hanging till this day.