Eric, I'm sorry for your visceral memories of 9/11, but that's not what
I meant. The Islamist attack is not responsible for the sorry state of
the US or the world. The blame lies at the feet of those who used the
tragedy to further an agenda they already had planned out. Viktor
Frankl reminds us that we always have the freedom and the responsibility
of our attitude in the face of what happens to us. Remember the voices
after 9/11 that said we were letting the terrorists win when we become
like them? Well, we have become like them.
I don't want to leave that last sentence like that, because even it is
not the truth. We were already like them, but hid it more. Now it is
public policy. And there seems more hope for a person who hides the
evil they do -- seeing that hiding suggests some shame or recognition of
wrongdoing. Now, there's not even that. The whole world can see it,
even if most Americans can't.
Ursula
Eric Yost wrote:
Ursula: Mike is not abusing America. He's standing up for a vision of America about to disappear. . . . You're trashing my world and my children's children's world.
I understand this feeling. How many times since 9/11 have I woke up with the sense that this world must be some sort of dream...and then realized, no, it was the aftermath of the Islamist attack, many people had died, heat forcing them from the top of the burning towers, leaping to their death into a pink cloud of vaporized blood. And worse, that there was an ongoing conflict about the response, part of the population hating the other part's attempts to make it right, the situation complicated by profiteering corporations cashing in on homeland security, conspiracy theorists blaming Bush for the attack, and so on.
Oh to only make it go away! To forget the smell of incinerated bodies. To construct the kind of denial that I could believe in, to negotiate it all away, to use a magic charm, to invent a wall against time, to just walk away from it into the mid-90s or the late '80s which I disliked so much at the time but now regard as a sort of happy time.
But there is no way back to that, only forward.
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